Profile avatar
alienmelon.bsky.social
Slovenian gamedev, i make experimental games and software ~Tetrageddon, Everything is going to be OK, Electric Zine Maker… http://tetrageddon.com ✨ http://unicornycopia.com 🌈 nonbinary bi they/them 🏳️‍🌈
2,131 posts 6,675 followers 488 following
Prolific Poster
Conversation Starter

We love this!💜❤️

2 resources I mentioned in my "Zines x Values Charters" workshops yesterday: the amazing visual design of the Electric Zine Maker✨ tool; & Jacqui Sahagian's “How the Praxis Charter Helped Me Put Out a Fire” [a literal home fire]: scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/praxis-... #BuildingBookLabs25

Feed: "The Candybox Blog" By: alienmelon on Wednesday, May 21, 2025

with the prevalence of things like standards, or best design practices, it’s easy to forget that games & software are all fantasy. the digital world is a collective construct. it doesn’t have to be any one way. games can be anything, so why not design something completely unconventionally unique.

i’m seriously considering publishing “individualism in the dead internet age” on the Epic Games store just to see how that would go. seems like a win-win, because if it gets rejected for the same reasons as Steam, i just have more screenshots i can add to the game to illustrate it’s point 😆

Oh straight into my heart! Exactly this!

"ocean::ephemera . . . is a surrealist sea of sound. It captures that feeling of awe when you look at something you can’t quite make out, but it’s all so grand. The movement of waves, coupled with sound that fills up a vast unknowable space, enveloping you as you journey through… something."

here’s a small curation of games that exist outside the urge to be understood. “Digital art: I want to be confused. I don’t want to understand. I want to see something for the first time again. Rarely a game does that, and when it does it’s a precious thing.” www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/not...

via mastodon, City of Six Moons: hollandspiele.com/products/cit... “Its rules are written in “alien” diagrams and its designer is steadfast in refusing to answer any rules questions about it. It plays around with the question of what is a board game if its rules are ambiguous or even unknowable.”

with the prevalence of things like standards, or best design practices, it’s easy to forget that games & software are all fantasy. the digital world is a collective construct. it doesn’t have to be any one way. games can be anything, so why not design something completely unconventionally unique.

Feed: "The Candybox Blog" By: alienmelon on Tuesday, May 20, 2025

here’s a small curation of games that exist outside the urge to be understood. “Digital art: I want to be confused. I don’t want to understand. I want to see something for the first time again. Rarely a game does that, and when it does it’s a precious thing.” www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/not...

~Not Quite A Game (Games that go beyond the need to be understood)~ "Maybe language is deeper than words. When you take words away there’s this sense of awe you can find when having to learn how to understand something. You need to meet it on its own terms. That’s what’s special about digital art."

~Not Quite A Game (Games that go beyond the need to be understood)~ "Maybe language is deeper than words. When you take words away there’s this sense of awe you can find when having to learn how to understand something. You need to meet it on its own terms. That’s what’s special about digital art."

“The future of games curation will be bloggers, hobbyists, and small people that take it on themselves to share their passion with others. Where established voices have failed us, there will be true alternatives pursuing something better. We are our own solution.”

Absolutely adore this; the idea of four mice on screen as devs bicker instantly and strongly appeals to me given that one of my favourite parts of playing ttrpgs online is everyone scrambling to make cobbled together images and in-jokes in Google slides whenever they're not actively speaking lmao

“The future of games curation will be bloggers, hobbyists, and small people that take it on themselves to share their passion with others. Where established voices have failed us, there will be true alternatives pursuing something better. We are our own solution.”

These echo my hopes and fears for games media's future, for sure. No one should feel unsafe, least of all those on the margins. Digital play and writing about the potential loveliness of that experience shouldn't be this fraught.

As always, Nathalie and their work are fascinating. Nathalie does not deserve harassment, at all. I really like their thoughts about the death of mainstream games media (some of it self-inflicted) and how curation of small indie games and art games specifically needs its own ecosystem. Good post.

i published a post about conversations i had at A MAZE, on an important topic… Conversations About Curation And The Future Of Games Crit: www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/con... "The future is something wildly different. One that will function outside of these outdated norms and compromised values."

i published a post about conversations i had at A MAZE, on an important topic… Conversations About Curation And The Future Of Games Crit: www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/con... "The future is something wildly different. One that will function outside of these outdated norms and compromised values."

This is an incredible use of Bitsy. It's a messy and scrappy document of a brilliantly unexpected jamming method. I think watching the process was the best part of this, to the point where I reckon with a bit of production it could make a really cool audience event.

There should be a games press level, cultural boycott of Microsoft.

Hello world! Welcome to Exhibit Play. We're dedicated to discovering and sharing hyper specific curated game lists. No algorithms, no AI. All human curated.

Will write a blog post about my time at A MAZE. soon. But right now I can say that this experience has deeply changed me. I'm digging through "abandoned" projects, and seeing a lively cosmic presence. Old projects are new again. Future projects are entering into unknown experimental territory.

sharing this one last time before letting it vanish into the 👁️social🙀media😱void👁️ forever…

And if you have a website, STOP FUCKING PROMOTING THESE THINGS TOO.

It's true. It's a whole thing. There are hundreds if not thousands of gen z who were or are apart of virtual democracies that have ended in insane and unhinged ways and that doesn't even involve the skullduggery going on in fandom servers.

today's advertisers are all cowards

I've been making video games in some form for 20 years, so I wrote an article about my process - and why I don't use an engine. noelberry.ca/posts/making...

Implemented a new solitaire where at first the cards have ambiguous suit & value, and you need to move them around to reduce their options until they resolve into specific cards (the two-letter combos are to help identify cards before they resolve)

made a zine for my dnd character (hogry hailflurry the tabaxi barbarian) using Electric Zine Maker on itchio which is also part of this bundle that has like 6 hrs left on it go go go get it itch.io/b/2965/crips... #dnd #zine #dungeonsanddragons #oc #originalcharacter #ocsky

At some point you have to wonder what's even the point of having independent games criticism if all you're doing is following the same tired treadmill that literally every news outlet that's been hollowed out in the last 5 years has followed to its eventual death.

what was interesting this week was the discussions about curation & the future of games crit. imo games crit, esp mainstream, hasn’t ever worked well for smaller games. with the way it evolved historically, and from what…imo games are still too new of a medium. i don’t think we “figured it out” yet…

i just posted the game made during the A MAZE "massive multiplayer Bitsy" workshop :) alienmelon.itch.io/too-many-gam... "The game posted here is the accumulation of effort from multiple teams. As it turns out, and much like there can never be "too many games", there can never be "too many gamedevs"