iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 19/08/2026

That makes a lot of sense, it actually almost reads as a bit simple, though I imagine getting it to look good is hard. Are you doing it in a 3D texturing software or are you using something more old school like Photoshop?

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 19/08/2026

The style looks great. How'd you approach the texture creation?

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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

it feels odd that what's holding technology back from benefiting humanity at this moment, isn't really a technological problem, but a bureaucratic issue of incentive structures there's so much money being wasted on things that are either neutral or a net negative within tech now, it's weird

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 18/08/2026

I can see where this is coming from but personally I kind of liked the rushed, almost chaotic feeling of the ending.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 17/08/2026

Getting back into reading has been a wonderful experience. For nearly a decade I've just listened to audiobooks thinking I didn't have the attention span to read. Now I'm realising how much it's helping me improve my attention span

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 14/08/2026

Baldur's Gate 3 for me. I can totally understand why people love it but god the combat felt so shallow compared to Divinity Original Sin 2

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Jon Renish @jonrenish.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Scrolling my socials this week.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 13/08/2026

I think a lot of users bought in on a Quest 2 or 3 expecting a console style of games, then were shocked to find an enthusiast hobby. So while there are plenty of wonderful and interesting experiences, they only see that there haven't been any "AAA" releases since Alyx.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 13/08/2026

It's sad seeing the quantity of llm slop mods flooding my feed on Reddit and some forums. The average VR consumer is already of the mindset that "there's no good new VR games since Alyx", this is just making it worse. Drowning out actually interesting games and passion projects

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Anton @antonhand.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

VR getting flooded with llm-coded mods is like watching a lovely neighborhood you dug get flood-replaced with Crumbl-cookies and other stripmall slop. I'm sure it'll keep lots of folks entertained, but all I see is the last vestiges of a market for true dedicated work drown.

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Zombie Zi @majormcdoom.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Google is auto-opting us into letting them not only save, but train AI on *any media* uploaded during *any* search interaction, including regular Search, Maps, Lens, Translate, Shopping, Flights, etc. Turn off "Search Services History", and delete *all your past data* (reason in thread below).

Your media is saved when Search Services History is on: Saved media includes your images, files, audio and video from your interactions with Search services to help improve your experience. For example, this lets you revisit your past visual searches with Lens or continue a Search Live conversation about a song you heard. To support these types of interactive product experiences, Google will now save your media to your Search Services History, applying robust privacy and security protections. Like your Search Services History, your saved media is also used to develop and improve Google services and technologies, including AI models and safety measures. With this transition, if your Web & App Activity setting is currently...

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Des Walsh @deswalsh.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Curtain Road, London EC2A Concrete slap and tactile paving footpath with manhole covers and brick road. #reference #materialreference

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 27/07/2026

I'm shocked with how fun it's been. I'm also really liking the meta progression as a side note. It's making for a fun coop mode

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 26/07/2026

Total time spent on it including finding the concept, modeling, UVs, textures, shaders, layout and setup, was probably 10-20 hours. Which now that I'm saying it out loud makes me feel rusty.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 26/07/2026

I was using the following reference image. I'm not entirely happy with how the paint looks but broadly I like the overall feel. I might go through and add more rubble and junk to the scene before I'll be completely satisfied with it.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 26/07/2026

The grates are extremely simple, especially material wise. Though I like the silhouettes they produce for the lighting. The doors have literally no purpose other than an interesting asymmetric feature for the length of the tunnel The exterior terrain was slapped together in about 10 minutes.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 26/07/2026

The walls and floor are a custom height blending shader based off of one I made a while ago using vertex colours as the blend between material layers, this one has been changed to using a mask texture and UV layer as I wanted to get more resolution out of it without needing a lot more verticies.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 26/07/2026

God it's been a while since I went from concept/reference through to a relatively finished simple scene. It's been really fun though. These shots are just coming out of the scene view in Unity 6.3 using URP.

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Lucien Greathouse @lpg.space · 22/07/2026

I feel like game devs are a unique combination of all of “doing some of the hardest software engineering”, “wild west cowboy bullshit”, and “hitting themselves in the head with hammers for no reason”

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 21/07/2026

Bro what are you doing to Suzanne?! 😂

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 12/07/2026

Personally I've really liked Proton VPN, plus Proton more generally provide some great services

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 12/07/2026

Anecdotally, my friends and I absolutely were. Played a run when it first entered early access then didn't touch it since. 1.0 has been feeling great so far

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 10/07/2026

Just to be clear, I don't like AI art in really any instance. Hell I find the use of AI for even coding to be iffy at best, but the act of trying to hide and portray the generated images as something more is reprehensible

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 10/07/2026

It's one thing to post AI "art" and act like it's special but, I absolutely despise the amount of clearly AI generated images on platforms like Art Station that are tagged as #NoAI #GameReady or put under various software used categories. Like this is clearly just AI gen images, this isn't real

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Jon Phillips @jowiph.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

I would kill or die for Larry

A small operation in Oregon that hunts truffles with a trained dog has added an unpaid trainee. A cat named Larry accompanies the handler and the truffle dog into the woods every outing, works a patch of ground a little apart from them, and digs with tremendous confidence in places where there is nothing.
The handler says Larry has never found a truffle and shows no sign of understanding the assignment. He does not use scent the way the dog does and he does not respond when the dog makes a find.
He simply digs his own holes nearby and then inspects them. "He thinks he's on the team," the handler said. "He is emphatically not on the team."
TRUFFLE DOG FINDS THE TRUFFLES -
'TRAINEE' CAT DIGS RANDOM HOLES AND FINDS DIRT

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 25/06/2026

Yeah fair enough 😂 Either way it looks good and it works

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 25/06/2026

I may not be on this platform much but I do love seeing the updates of this goofy lil game. Is the see-through effect being done via shader or do you have that as another type of effect?

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 25/06/2026

It's going to be interesting to see how the broader user base reacts to the bland mixing of AAA games as these sorts of changes occur. Will they finally realise that the broader indie market is worth exploring or simply accept and move on

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wooby @ruby.gay · 19/06/2026

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 18/06/2026

I've been working on controlling the movements and facing directions of enemies with guns to make for more convincing strafing and diagonal movement. Ideally replicating the behaviour of keeping armoured plates facing the target while moving in a realistic way.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 17/06/2026

Are you including classic combos like the sun? 😂

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 16/02/2026

I had an incredible trip to Japan recently. Here's a few of my favourite photos I took on my old Nikon

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 05/01/2026

While nothing wildly complex, this opens the door to a far more interesting enemy in my eyes. Importantly though this system is also fairly optimal at this stage. A major optimization I made was containing all posts for the group as structs for far faster sorting. 3/3

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 05/01/2026

Currently I have five variables combined to determine the weighted value for each post. Does the post have a cover angle? Is the Target within Effective Range? Is the cover angle beyond minimum distance from other NPCs? Is the cover position within range of the NPC? And a random modifier 2/3

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 05/01/2026

I want to share something I am wildly proud of as someone who doesn't view themself as a programmer. After more than a year of trying to teach myself how to code and work on Enemy behaviors, I have successfully made a simplified system inspired by the Posts in the Uncharted GDC talk... 1/3

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Ash @h1twom4n.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Sorry it had to come to this but

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HEALTH @health.band · 24/12/2025

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Karla Ortiz @kortizart.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

1/5 Seeing some tech/ai slop accounts online claiming that AI has always been used in games, pretending GenAi is a part of that, when its absolutely not. Yes, AI has always been a part of games in: NPC behaviors, Data Mining, PCG’s (Procedural Content Generation) etc All different from GenAi!

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 19/09/2025

Not only do they functionally demonstrate what is good about the game, I.E., manipulating and destroying physics objects, but they also serve the purpose of showing the state of the world and the sort rule the combine choose to utilize. Abrupt and visceral violence to squash any sort of rebellion

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 19/09/2025

In all of the games you've played, what were the best non-boss enemies? What made them so memorable to you? For me, things like the manhack from Half Life 2 are oddly high despite their simplicity #gamedev #enemies #NPC

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 31/07/2025

After trying to teach myself to Rig for a couple of weeks, I realised I wanted a more formal understanding so I went out and got a course by @pierrick-picaut.bsky.social. While quite early, I already feel like it was the right choice as it's already answered a handful of the questions I had

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 17/07/2025

The lack of good FPS games set in the Stargate Universe is shocking to me. Like the format of the show is a basic shooter design; mission brief, loading screen (wormhole), do objective, fight back to the gate. Add in some background plot and puzzles and it would be a great either sp or coop game

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Nathan Pichot @karamelizedsoda.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

Some nice texture of peeling paint #Reference #MaterialReference

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 04/07/2025

me and all the source boys love some old concrete

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 04/07/2025

Rigs for reference, next step is to add in some custom shapes and actually look at the utility for bone collections as this rig is fairly simply. I want to add, I'm not overly happy with the animations themselves, more just happy to finally have completely one from conception to engine import

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 04/07/2025

This is been hellish to learn how to do correctly (still figuring that out) but I'm starting to understand organic and "character" art more. As such, here is my first semi-successful attempt at custom sculpting, rigging, and animation. I welcome any and all advice

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 26/06/2025

I think this is a big part of it. I work mainly as a generalist 3D artist on my professional side and am currently stuck on character art and animation + the implementation of that in engine.

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 26/06/2025

It's always nice to hear other people sharing this view tbh. The in person teaching is great, but the admin and grading is just mind numbing sometimes. The pay is also great

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Tristan Castle @tristancastle.com · 26/06/2025

A question for my fellow professionals and academics in the game development space. How do y'all deal with burn out when working on personal projects outside of your paid work hours? I ask because I have been stuck in a rut for a few months now and I'm keen for any advice

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