iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Games week coming on fast. gotta find me some vic based pixel artists and narrative folks this time around.

Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Sometimes I test my free will by going against my nature, like not finishing this puzzle with only 13 pieces to go cause I said I was gonna go to bed at 10:30.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I’ve been going around and around on this relationship system in my game and finally settled on a design that I think is working. Been taking me weeks to solve that one though!!

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Man I got a dev branch on this relationship feature that I keep bashing my head against and now i’m scared to merge it back to the trunk cause its so many versions ago and those merges are gonna be craaaaazy. 😭

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Got to feel a new level of old this week when I mentioned how I got my start making Flash websites and the two people in the room asked me “What’s Flash?”

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

My listening habits have been bouncing between Metalcore and Hyperpop lately which are totally at odds with each other. Is there a metalcore hyperpop mashup? Would that even work?

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Blizzard have me replaying warcraft 3 which is just crazy… It’s so good though.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I’m hiring at the moment and we had hundreds of applicants. My HR guy makes a point of personalising rejection letters and trying to give people specific feedback and helpful tips. One person who got rejected called it ai slop, then left a 1 star review on my business simply saying we use AI…

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Mate of mine just shared a viral friendslop game called ‘Needle in a Haystack’ I tried to look it up on steam, but I think the AI bros got there first. Which one is the OG??

Steam listings for all the needle in a haystack games

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Came in to the office 2 hours early today to try and get in front, whole morning my pc has been failing and i've just been on customer support call…

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Just spoke with my Nan, she’s 90 today and she told me she did a plank with her pt for her birthday haha

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Saving and loading without things breaking is the ultimate gamedev test of your wiles. Wyles? whyles? I think I may be procrastinating from working on the saving and loading bugs…

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I hope that Witcher 3 remaster is compatible with saves. Literally in the middle of my (very overdue) Witcher 3 full playthrough and I don’t wanna have to restart for a 4th time. Assuming it is though and in which (witch?) case I’m very excited for it!

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Finally picked up a copy of the game design bible.

A copy of The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Went to a phone free warehouse gig last night to see Klangkuenstler, and was disappointed to see everyone with their phones out still recording.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Another UI system block out down - this time a quest hud and log.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

We’ve taken to calling the collectable things in Big Walk “Dongs”. Childish, I know. Just learned it’s modelled of Wilson’s Prom, so now they’re “Prom Dongs”.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

An insight into the things i think about in the shower: Just had the realisation that if austin powers came out today, the time difference would be the equivalent of a spy from the late 90s instead of late 60s

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Sometimes you build a whole rostering system over a couple of weekends and noone notices, other times you throw in a bunch of new fonts in an evening and everyone is like HOLY SHIT! #gamedev

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I’m sure A* pathfinding works really well when you know what you’re doing but I feel like I have it working and then some NPC will just get stuck in some new exciting way that makes me tear my hair out! Oh, and good luck googling AI pathfinding in a post LLM world…

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

If that were true the digital store would already be cheaper, not more expensive than the physical releases.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Can’t stop working on the game, it’s basically all I want to do 24/7 atm. I am fixated.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I’m feeling pretty chuffed rn. My playtesters unprompted are reporting enjoying exactly the things I was hoping they would around the juxtaposition of the dynamics.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Hit our internal deadline today for an updated playable pre-alpha build for the team. Feels good to finally close the loop on most of the major features to start iterating from.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Dialogue tree or dialogue forest? Got the prototype placeholder “portal” just about ready and now I’m getting kinda attached to it.

A giant web of a dialogue tree, zoomed out so impossible to read.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

For my marketing agency - I am hiring a content manager. You gotta be Melbourne based (cause you need to shoot local content), but it’s hybrid and you get to work with some pretty cool people in a bit of an unhinged workplace! What’s not to love? assemblo.com/news/content...

assemblo.com

We're looking for a Content Manager! – Assemblo

Assemblo is hiring a Content Manager in Melbourne to lead content strategy, social media, filming, editing and publishing for our clients.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Making a full scale video game is such an undertaking… I mean obviously, but god…

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

In this week's episode of usettling bugs - The carrot guy here is made of JUST a custom head, but the NPC building thing we made has default legs and torso, creating a disturbing carrot puppet.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Printer charging a 25% surcharge for AI generated image printing.

“It is rubbish but is ready to print unlike AI generated images.

AI generated images take a significant chunk of our time and knowledge to make them printable.

Starting today, AI generated images carry a 25% surcharge to print.”

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

astar path finding bugs kicking my arse tonight…

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

My son (6 yr old) did the first play test on our game prototype and he played for an hour until I made him stop for bed routine. Feels like a good start!

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Built a lil tutorial system that saves all my lil tutorial screens into the player handbook for future reference, spent the night using the little toolkit I also made to generate everything so I can pump out a bunch of these suckers for the prototype playtests. Feeling pretty sweet.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

preinstall cruelty-free cyberpunk point-and-click CD-ROM

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Last night I sat down determined to play some games and instead I added a whole clearing debris system to my game instead.

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Reposted by Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS

Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

If you've ever updated a robots.txt file on a web server? It's my fault that they exist (I wrote a badly-behaved web crawler in 1993, got rapped over the knuckles and told "use this"). I also invented a few D&D monsters in my teens such that without them there'd be no Baldur's Gate or Planescape.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Getting gastro twice in as many months its some real bullshit, but at least this time i’m not in japan for it…

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Man Ninajirachi was incredible on Friday night, still thinking about it…

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Hi, my name is Steve and my toxic trait is that I buy thousands and thousands of hours of games but only play games like an hour a day tops, and like to try and 100% complete them before moving on

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

went to get a prework coffee, person in front of me just ordered 32 coffees. Skipping the coffee this morning :(

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Niiiice i just got a usb-c backbone for $50 unopened at vinnies

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

A classic Grandfather Stalk bail up. It’ll be expensive to produce, but should we make this so it actually takes all night in real life to get through? I mean, think about the immersion!

Ask Grandfather Stalk about this world.

He tells you about Gorglorz and how he's enslaved the carrotpeople, forcing them to pay ridiculous taxes. He "talks all night" so you have to go back to the supermarket now.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Just impulse bought a bunch of Amiibos and a Paper Mario game before I even got outta bed.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

No physical games might actually be the thing that ends me being a playstation owner. I mostly buy ps games cause I like collecting them. It’s one of the reasons I’m not all in on steam and pc gaming. Without that distinction, I don’t really see the appeal anymore for me personally.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Sony just closed the PS3 store, meaning any digital only ps3 games are dead, and all patches will be gone. From an ownership and software preservation perspective it feels pretty concerning, especially as games are getting increasingly more online only.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

A whole day lost to migrating time tracking software… ahh well at least it’s done.

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Steve de Niese 🔜 MIGW / GCAP / PAXAUS @stevedeniese.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Man I live these noclip retros. I already want to hide some almost impossible secret late game stuff in my game, but this just cements that idea for me.

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