iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

And then the final closing animation was mostly thanks to the help of @vaporgabe.com who was kind enough to share some MoGRTs he'd already made for another project and I had an easy time modifying.

An animation of flying through a time wormhole. Text: AAAAAAND... TIME!

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And then I made a dynamic graphic controlled by the interview crew for the time machine. (Built in @rive.app and within a single day, too) ...screenshot chosen purely for the Brutal Melo drip

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The final 'feature' I can talk about isn't so much about Pratchett itself, but I ended up getting to work a lot more with the interview team this go-round and help with the pre-show! First, we repurposed the animation I did for the close of SGDQ2025 as a fun callback to open the show...

An animated shot of a futuristic skyline with a neon "GDQ" sign in the foreground. Titles say "THE YEAR: 3026"

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We also made a new randomizer tracker for Donkey Kong 64, colorized to match the runner's shirts. This one was built by @mesosupe.bsky.social, who has more less become "the randomizer/bingo guy" on our dev team. 😂

Screenshot of the Donkey Kong 64 Randomizer run at AGDQ 2026

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For the Super Mario 64 70 Star/70 Runner relay, @hatetosayit.com built a custom lower third grpahic so that we could have every runner's name on screen without constantly just changing the 'runner nameplate', which would have been hard to notice.

A screenshot from the Super Mario 64 70 Star Relay at AGDQ 2026. The runner 'Tomomodachi' has their name in a lower third over the gameplay

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Okay, let's talk about the Maimai DX run, because this was definitely the thing I heard about the most from people. You really liked this presentation and layout!

A screenshot of the Maimai DX Prism Plus run from AGDQ 2026

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Moving onto new things! Probably my favorite new addition were the animations added to the omnibar for bid war announcements.

A graphic that looks like a pixellated metal door with red lights. The text in front says "BIDS CLOSED"

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To recap, our current broadcast software, Pratchett, has been in use since 2022. Many of the components have changed, the but the base framework has largely survived intact. To compare, here's a version of the same gameplay layout from its first event (AGDQ2022) and from last week.

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On top of all that, we had to find a way to fit all of this on a layout without making the text impossible to read. This one took awhile to solve, but we got there in the end.

A full screenshot of the Blue Prince B Quest run from SGDQ 2025

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On top of that, we added logic to draw lines connecting rooms when they were both collected by either (or both) players. Game state is now much easier to understand at a glance!

a grid of squares from a Blue Prince tracker. Squares are either black, blue, red, or white, and have similar colored lines connecting adjacent squares showing paths on the board.

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Solution: I redesigned the bingo squares to match the style of Blue Prince's overhead view of rooms. If both players have collected a square, it turns white instead of the diagonal colors, since the old design can be confusing geographically for pathing.

A bird's eye view of a square room with doors on four sides. It's shown four times in four different colors: Black, Blue, Red, and White

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The Blue Prince was a quasi-Bingo run, where instead of having a standard 5x5 grid of squares, you're playing on a 5x9 grid matching the layout of the mansion in the game. The goal is to cross off squares in a pattern that connects from the bottom center 'START' to the top center 'GOAL' squares.

A screenshot of a 'bingo' board from Blue Prince "B Quest" mode. Most squares are black, a few are red, a few are blue, and some are both red and blue with a diagonal shape separating the two colors

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...and then we had really fun ones like Sonic Adventure 2, which talked directly with data from Archipelago. Getting everything on screen in a way that was both legible and comprehensive was a fun challenge.

A screenshot from SGDQ 2025, featuring Sonic Adventure 2. 2 gameplay feeds are visible, along with tracker graphics to show which items/emeralds have been collected by each player

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Gameplay layouts! We did a few new ones! Some were pretty simple, like "Widescreen 2, 4 Nameplates, Co-op"...

A screenshot of gameplay from Summer Games Done Quick 2025 featuring 4 players playing through Monster Hunter Wilds. 2 gameplay screens are visible

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The Interview team put together a Millionaire-style quiz for the opening segment, and I got some overlays put together during setup. Some of the questions veer into the delirious. All of this was done with Figma and was essentially an image slideshow, which worked just fine.

A screenshot from the GDQ pre-show. Kungfufruitcup and SpikeVegeta have bewildered expressions as the host reads a question that barely qualifies as a quiz question. "Deltarune is the event closer this SGDQ, and has recently seen the addition of two new chapters. When we met in the green room an hour ago, I divulged a deep, dark truth about myself. What was it?

A: I LOVE eat pencils
B: I would NEVER eat a pencil, how dare you
C: When I was 11 years old, my goldfish Orange Juice died, and my dad looked me in the eyes and told me it was my fault.

BrutalMelo is greenscreened into the bottom left corner of the shot for reasons I still don't 100% understand.

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With half a day left in the marathon, we've received over $80k through the new user flow, which is a huge win for charity!

A screenshot from Twitch that says "Doctors Without Borders - We've raised $81,769.28"

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In order to retain support for those actions, we developed a new Twitch Extension that communicates with both the GDQ tracker and the Twitch API. When you donate, the Extension comes to life and gives you a set amount of time to supply that info.

A screenshot of GDQ's twitch broadcast featuring the donation twitch extension

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The GDQ website received a new donation workflow, a gargantuan design task that was the work of GDQ's own @softer.bsky.social. Donating now takes less clicks, it's easier to choose incentives/bid wars, it looks better on mobile, and it's less intimidating for first-time donors. Huge win!

A screenshot of the GDQ donation web page

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On a more personal note, this was the first event that I (Chris) got to attend in person since 2016. I was only there for setup and opening day, but it was so meaningful to be able to see old friends as well as meet others in person for the first time. I wish I’d taken more photos.

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All incentives now live-update! Each donation gets its own full animation, including flashing chevrons and energy balls ($5 per ball) firing at the total to move it forward.

a screenshot of the GDQ omnibar showcasing donation behavior

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Here's a bit of the work file, for those curious:

a screenshot of Rive featuring the GDQ omnibar project

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The biggest problem for us has always been animation: If I want to make a complex animation for a NodeCG graphic, it can be a huge pain. Here are two slides from my presentation to @guido.rive.app, presented without comment:

A slide describing our animation process: 1. Design in Figma 2. Finalize in PS 3. Animate in AE 4. Demo in Codepen 5. Coded in NodeCG

The same slide but with an element overlaid on top saying I JUST BUILT THIS THING FIVE TIMES AND I DO NOT LIKE IT

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But the bulk of our efforts and star of the show for #AGDQ2025 was the completely revitalized ticker at the bottom of the screen, which we refer to as the 'omnibar' because it has to communicate EVERYTHING. This was a complete rework, and while it's still in progress, was a HUGE victory for us.

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But a lot of the stuff we built this time around- other than the big thing half this thread will be devoted to (stay tuned)- is one-off assets. Yes, I drew a banana for the pre-show. I contain multitudes.

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The design requirements for the rhythm games we've showcased have meant some great collaboration with the runners and the production crew, especially for bringing Jubeat onto the stage and getting a bird's eye camera on the console rather than capturing a game feed.

A screenshot of AGDQ2025 featuring Jubeat Copious Append

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