iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

At first you can only decode the last part, which only roughly translates into “emanations of invisible power” and is recognizable because it’s similar to runes seen at the entrances to all kinds of very dangerous places. Everyone is very excited about the invisible magic sword.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Boosting visibility as I might know some folks who are interested.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

We won’t be the same without Bel, but we’re still doing the thing.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I haven’t been at ZOS for over a decade now but every word of this rings true. Even most of the specific examples are things I can remember fondly, and I could probably add several more.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

extremely same, though possibly for completely different reasons. I was fresh out of school learning Real Things about making Real Games and I fought with the PS3 dev kit just to do some testing

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

The first game I ever did any work on, while I was on the other project at that studio!

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I have spent years of effort to do this thing, because headphones are extremely uncomfortable for me, and it has taken a precise setup, extremely specific equipment configured a very precise way, and it is incredibly brittle and needs reconfiguring for any new voice apps. Not trivial at all.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Yeah, this one hits hard. What the actual fuck.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Broadly, games do teach working through a stressful situation, though a lot of the levers used aren’t very refined, it’s usually short timescales rather than other types of stress. It’s possible to abstract stress out differently, though.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Yeah, it’s all in the abstraction. To some extent games teach the latter sort of accidentally— nearly every timed “escape” sequence in a game teaches you to focus on your path and ignore distractions, or can be tuned to do so.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Similarly, you can develop mental pathways for decision trees through games, which is a type of critical thinking: plotting paths, optimizing use of resources, or strategizing in various ways. We worked on a game to teach pilots to recognize various system failures in planes.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Reading and math skills are both able to be developed through games, as well as spatial reasoning and other forms of abstract thought. Players who play driving games are demonstrably better at driving cars in real life because they practice perception skills useful to driving.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

This was a big focus of research I worked on in college. The answer is “yes, absolutely”, and a variety of projects like the Games To Teach program were built to try to harness it. Games are extremely good at building mental pathways and reinforcing thought patterns.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Especially one that got to actually build out everything on Disc 2.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Xenogears. Still holds up, but I would love a glow up version.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

The barks and the level design are masterclasses. I’m deeply impressed by them modernizing Bond as a character, that’s a hard trick to pull off. The IOI folks have been doing incredible work with Hitman and 007 First Light is an amazing flex from them into a different genre.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I am very happy to announce what I’ve been working on for the last while :)

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Ten thousand musicians and ten thousand livestreamers who follow major public figures and sing, alternately, heroic scene-setting ballads or mocking "Brave Sir Robin" style commentary as they go about their days, based on how thoughtful, kind, and empathetic the figure is.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

This book and ork books were where I started in 40K books and they completely ruined me for everything else.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

I think the Knight, Agent, and Warrior were the best stories in that game. They really hit some good notes when they were firing on all cylinders.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Mine is the Nintendo Entertainment System, which I have always enjoyed.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Yes! I finished it going “hee hee, that’s fun” rather than slogging through thing “yes you’re SO clever”. Big difference.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Really glad I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. It was *clever* (negative connotation).

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

My three year old is suddenly very into Pokemon thanks to Pokopia, and already understands that people have six. She’s picked her six and I’m mildly concerned about the obvious theming:

A series of Pokemon thumbnails of a three year old’s favorites: charmander, torkoal, torchic, charcadet, scorbunny, and onix, most of which are Fire types which gives the author some concerns

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Reposted by Tamrielo

Chuck Tingle @chucktingle.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

'hey what are you up to over there? wow thats pretty cool.'

question: Hey Dr. Tingle, got any parenting advice? I’m pretty sure we’ve already got the unconditional love and support bit down, but wow this is an intimidatingly high stakes job!

answer: this is going to sound OVERLY SIMPLISTIC but in some ways i think that is the point, because the specifics will always vary but i think this part will remain the same:

your gift to your child is positive attention. it is simply to care

when they are young it is to take a moment and give them your time. to read to them. to play. to say 'hey what are you up to over there? wow thats pretty cool.'

when they are older they might start to push away and that is fine, you still just say 'hey what are you up to over there? wow thats pretty cool.'

when they are adults you will call them on the phone and say 'hey what are you up to over there? wow thats pretty cool.'

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

I recently played As Long As You're Here and there's a bit in that game involving taking medication; it really captured this kind of feeling.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

It does consistently amaze me how often the same fundamentals are argued over in the MMO space in a way I don’t see in a ton of other genres.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

I remember sitting and taking notes in those roundtables, the once or twice I made it to GDC. Now I make MMOs and debate with myself how much I feel like those notes have changed!

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

My successor picked it up and, after using it for about a year, made a few really smart updates to it. Her comment to me was that the document saved her weeks of work trying to understand the automation, and she cut out tons of tests that she immediately knew wouldn't be useful.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

In its place I left a document about how the automation process worked, why it worked that way, the goals of the automation, and things that my successor(s) could check to ensure it was still working properly and test if they had ideas to improve it.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

I did my due diligence, following the complete process and then testing which parts of it actually made a difference. I ultimately axed the entire thing and replaced it with an automated system which was 90% as effective and required 5 hours of dev work a year instead of 15 a month.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Too wordy, and the person implementing it will go "ugh, yeah, yeah, I got it" and move forward even if they don't. In my last role, there was a design doc for a process left by the previous producer-turned-product-manager that was 28 pages long. People had been trying to follow it for years.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

A thing I think about a lot is "how close would someone get to implementing this the way I'm thinking if they can't talk to me?" Part of that is being clear, the other part is being concise. If your writing is unclear, the person implementing it is more likely to do so incorrectly.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Absolutely love this kind of design documentation, and it's very close to the model I use for both design and product feature documents. I do add two pieces to this model: Rationale (Why?) and Priority (which parts of this design are vital, and which can come later?), but same basic idea.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

The other piece of that puzzle was in big combats with lots of players, you might have rogues attack a cluster of healers, but one or two Friars in that cluster could appear to be casting heals but then jump into action. Friars not only LOOKED like caster, but could actively deceive.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

The Friar was one of the best aspects of DAoC PvP. Completely agree that unpredictability made it much more interesting on all sides of the equation.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

My other version of this is the Mass Effect-inspired RPG in which you play as an Academy graduate making their way through the ranks and dealing with a bunch of stories from the Academy all the way to Captaincy.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

What's your Star Trek project only you would love? Star Trek: Galaxy, a procedurally generated open galaxy game inspired by Stellaris and Crusader Kings, except instead of a 4X you're following one customizable ship through its many iterations across the Trek timeline, FTL-style.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

God, I wonder what I even said. Guess I’ll find out!

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Oh wow that was a while back, wasn’t it

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

This is also definitely not borne of working on desert levels and finding that the lack of verticality meant players could cross them way faster at a normal map size, and then amping up the sizes before coming to our senses and inventing verticality.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

I have a theory about this and it’s an art thing. Video game deserts often have very little vertical blocking and tend to be huge as a result, and when you see a non-dunes desert they read as “canyons” and not “deserts”, which people don’t view the same.

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Tamrielo @tamrielo.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

It’s great! I used it for these.

A pair of painted Battletech mech miniatures inside a lightbox, showing the use of dirty down moss effect for the grassy bases.

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