iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I remember very well its development as I was very active in the tigsoource community and indie scene back then, Cave Story was the big one that inspired a lot of that first wave of indies and lots of the metroidvanias, I was doing one myself back in 2007-8

Great list, surprised to see Aquaria, underrated game

Yes indeed, nowadays I live in London, he's in Sicily and our form of communication is sending each other challenge requests on chess.com, we always have a game open

Other favourites were Battle Isle, Dawn Patrol, Gunship, War in the Gulf, Admiral and something like Great Battles of History: Julius Caesar, played the shit out of all of them

My dad trying to teach me out how to steer a fleet of submarines while I'm sitting on his lap, age 5, "isn't this fun?!" I also had a Mig-29 sim I had to wait for a colleague of his to come by with his kids to get pirated copies of Prince of Persia, golden axe and Bart vs the Space Mutants

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 25/09/2026

We used it for the pictures on underdog.ltd, and I still have the pictures the original owner of my game boy camera snapped in the 90s

underdog.ltd

Team Roster

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Another Krondor enjoyer, heck yeah

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 25/09/2026

Cool project but wow that feels weird... And a slower way to play

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 24/09/2026

I got a game concept copied ages ago, I got mad for a bit, then understood that they made a fully functional game and I didn't, it wasn't a 1:1 clone but I still dropped my project, the guy that was making the music for it used that music to get a new gig for a little indie project called Minecraft

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 24/09/2026

There's no victim because it's not a crime, it's tasteless, morally crappy, but it's a good thing that game concepts can't be copyrighted not a bad one, and usually the original sells better and gets a big boost of visibility from the clone story, but you need to release it

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 24/09/2026

This is nothing new though, see Unrecorded and Bodycam or the million other mobile games that rip-off each other, AI can make it happen faster as it makes faster to do anything else, the lesson is don't market your one gimmick game months before you're ready to release it

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 23/09/2026

the only two type of videogames left

type of games in 2026
AAA
"we're going to spend a billion dollar to cancel the game and close the studio, there's no game"
Quirky-ass indie
"You're a goldfish working as an antiquarian restoring old clocks, also you smoke crack"

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 23/09/2026

Is the little shark missile animated? I'll have to install it myself to know, it's a really cool and weird 4X game btw!

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 23/09/2026

"It's not normal behaviour — not even cosplayers go around biting each other" I am dead

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Reposted by Giuseppe Navarria

SeverLink - Wishlist NOW! @severlink.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

SeverLink crowdfunding campaign is LIVE We have a playable prototype - just grab it at: www.backerkit.com/c/projects/c... If you long for early 2000s stealth revival and you like what you see in our build - GO FUND US and make it happen! #indiegame #indiedev #gamedev #lowpoly #y2k

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Reposted by Giuseppe Navarria

g0m @g0m.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A world where a twist ending is repurposed as a video title. where a thing's climax has been removed, leaving an advertisment for the gap where it used to be. such things are commonplace in. the twilight zone

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 18/09/2026

Yes I love that cover, and playing the game while reading the book is a pretty great way to experience it

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 16/09/2026

They did 4 days for years, it was the same at SD, we were a sister studio, the 4-day work week was not a good idea though

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 16/09/2026

Especially when it's a feature that the previous Spiderman games also had! (it's crazy seen people criticising these skins on socials too but sadly this is where we're at...)

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 15/09/2026

I've seen this even on ebay on few sellers offering old big box pc games 😭 I'm sure they're having a laugh but it's not just tacky and weird but also useless because I can't trust the images of the box and I'm not going to buy from these guys. They better add a "report fake image" feature soon

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 13/09/2026

I just read the posts, I'm so glad you're ok, take care ❤️

Kimimi🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com · 11/09/2026

Reposted by Giuseppe Navarria

Here's Essential Dungeon Crawlers, a brand new article for Ko-fi subscribers! Come walk with me - one tile at a time - through some of gaming's finest labyrinths! ko-fi.com/post/Essenti...

A photo showing a selection of dungeon crawler type games, from The Dark Spire (DS) to classic D&D adventures.

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 13/09/2026

I know the developers :) I'm from a nearby town from them, I was learning how to do games myself in the early 2000s and I met them a few times

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 12/09/2026

Depends on the day, that was a good one :)

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 11/09/2026

Amazing ❤️ congratulations Julia! I love my Playdate

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 10/09/2026

the untold pleasures of profiling a Game Maker game...

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 05/09/2026

That's fantastic, congratulations :)

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 27/08/2026

Worse, they're named after the hug emoji 🤗

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 27/08/2026

I guess they developed smolLM, but I don't think they're getting bought for that...

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 27/08/2026

These evaluations are straight up random numbers or what these days... 1337 billion for Freehold Games please Brian

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 25/08/2026

yeah get a variable power supply with adapters but you need to discover the polarity not just the size because you can easily end up killing the screen with the wrong one, Asus is really shit at providing basic info like this, imho they do that on purpose

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 23/08/2026

It definitely is for italian gen x and millennials

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 22/08/2026

It was just so different back then, I never believed the "things looked more exciting because you were young", it was a true golden era for games and while indie games today are fantastic I don't think the game industry will see anything similar to those years again

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 22/08/2026

Half-Life did it more, not only it shipped with its own multiplayer but also with Deathmatch Classic, that was a recreation of Quake 1 maps and guns, I never got how they were allowed to do that, they "remastered" Quake 1 dm and put it in the HL1 cdrom youtu.be/0bMrGDrigjY?...

youtu.be

Deathmatch Classic - Valve's loveletter to Quake + Remake

YouTube video by ESCalation

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 22/08/2026

Co-op doom and Quake are so underrated, everyone always thinks about deathmatch but my favourite experience of both games was having a friend over and staying up all night playing co-op doom, quake and hexen 2 via LAN

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 21/08/2026

I loved the pc version, and when I started emulating the megadrive (genecyst!) I stumbled onto Flink and I immediately noticed how much like Lomax it looked, the lush and otherworldy pixel art of Henk Nieborg graced both, a true game industry legend, still active! www.mobygames.com/person/28736...

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Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 21/08/2026

One of the very best times I had with a roguelike was playing Powder on a gp2x, it had a perfect sweet spot of just enough complexity but not too much to be very enjoyable on the go, with gamepad controls and on a tiny screen

Giuseppe Navarria @techdesign.rocks · 19/08/2026

OpenAI was a cool concept, with the non profit board controlling the company but it went bad fast... for the rest it's clear that the real power when you don't have a special technological edge over competitors (and that's always hard to keep) becomes infrastructure so yeah that's going to happen