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ari velazquez 🌯

@arivelazquez.com

2.5K followers 1.7K following 4.4K posts

technical designer @ riffraff.games ◦ pronounced airy ◦ he/him ◦ american gameboy in australia ◦ prev: coreborn, sims 4, dawngate ◦ fka roxaloxa https://arivelazquez.com ◦ discord: @roxaloxa

arivelazquez.com

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · Oct 18

hi new folk, i'm ari! 10 years in gamedev on shit you haven't heard of and one you definitely have, nowadays i'm a technical designer mainly in unreal and doing contract work and a hundred side projects.

one of my fave side things:

ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · Sep 22

life's been in the way of shareable work but here's the last thing i was jamming on: recreating Ys Origin in unreal so i can use it as a mechanical base for making my own game on top of it. would really love to come back to this

#gamedev #indiedev #screenshotsaturday #unrealengine5

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 9h

this is why painting a wall in my house felt more satisfying than anything i've done in my career

Reposted by ari velazquez 🌯

AJ @ajkolenc.bsky.social · 10h

After many days of playing I can still be surprised by a winning run. @richardboeser.bsky.social dominated the leaderboards yesterday with some unexpected path choices.

store.steampowered.com/app/3888920/...

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 10h

ahhhh patrick showed me this the other day, looks so fuckin sick dude

Reposted by ari velazquez 🌯

Michael Dashow @mdashow.bsky.social · Aug 19

Warning to anyone who has their art on Spreadshirt.com: They now have a feature where anyone can remix your art and it's impossible to opt out unless you just leave the site altogether.

Spreadshirt to artists: We’re taking your designs for AI pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/19/s...

Spreadshirt to artists: We’re taking your designs for AI

Spreadshirt is an online print-on-demand store. You can sell T-shirts and mugs and so on. My wife Arkady Rose is an artist as well as a musician, and had a pile of designs on Spreadshirt and Redbub…

pivot-to-ai.com

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 11h

being told by multiple people that drugs exist. looking into this

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 11h

sticking it between videos i like watching like getting a child to eat food they don't like on their plate

ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 12h

popping no-doz to get through this PCG tutorial series

ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 12h

i made it 2:30 before i went and slept on the couch for an hour

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 12h

someone should invent a pill that makes it so i don't want to take a nap the moment i start watching an unreal tutorial on youtube

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Yuna.EXE 🏳️‍⚧️ @yunanoire.bsky.social · Mar 10

Real opening paragraph in an Official Nintendo Magazine feature

"I once punched my younger brother so hard in the chest that he vomited up that morning's breakfast - cornflakes mainly. It wasn't technically the Heimlich manoevre, as he wasn't choking and I wasn't trying to save him-"

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 12h

it really does remind me of the early days of SEO in webdev

ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 12h

i don’t envy anyone who has to try to make sense of the black box’s output for their livelihood

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Gmad @gmad.bsky.social · 5d

I must pay for a new mattress and doctor's appointments and bills... I can make you a great model for a game or a VTuber or anything else you might need! (and I can animate it too!)
#lowpoly #3dart #commissions

Gmad @gmad.bsky.social · 9d

now opening up a low poly commission slot! if you need a vrchat/vtuber model, or a model for your game, send me a message!

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Reposted by ari velazquez 🌯

Leah Jade @legenette.bsky.social · 16h

here’s my full talk roundup for freeplay parallels 25, an excellent evening all around!!

Freeplay Parallels 25: everything revealed at the show | ScreenHub: Film, TV, Streaming and Games

Freeplay Parallels 25 was a celebration of fun, experimental indie games, and how developers continue to create in a storm of complications.

www.screenhub.com.au

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Matt Hackett @richtaur.bsky.social · 3d

Happy 2nd anniversary to the Steam Dev Cheat Sheet 🥂

LMK if any info is out of date! Good luck with your game 🎮

#indiegamedev

STEAM DEV CHEAT SHEET
Quick access to a collection of best practices & magic formulas:

STEAM CAPSULE
(Your Game)
The single most IMPORTANT element since it's seen the most
Clear
Readable
Game name
Genre
Hook(s)
Hire on artist!

THE DISCOVERY ALGORITHM
Get 7,000+ wishlists before launch
Get 10+ reviews ASAP (positive or negative, just need 10)
The only punishing review status is OVERWHELMINGLY NEGATIVE (the rest are neutral for traffic)

WISHLISTS
About 15% of wishlists convert in the first week.
ALL wishlisters are emailed at launch.
Discount 20%+ to email wishlisters after launch.

SALES ESTIMATES FROM REVIEWS
One review represents about 20-55 soles.
It's the New Boxleiter Number! ~30 is good
So 100 reviews = about 3,000 copies sold.

TRAILER
(Viewers skip through trailers)
Start strong
Omit intro logos
Direct to gameplay
60 seconds or less
End with ONE CTA: Wishlist it or buy it

Made in October 2023

From the author of How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself
valadria.com

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 15h

this is a really fun thread, some wild overlaps. time is fucked

rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 5d

you ever think about those real weird overlaps. like tennessee williams might have listened to the ramones

Reposted by ari velazquez 🌯

Samantha is the spectre haunting bluesky 👻 @bolshevikmilf.bsky.social · 5d

richard nixon could have watched the first season of star trek DS9

rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 5d

you ever think about those real weird overlaps. like tennessee williams might have listened to the ramones

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 15h

holy hell

ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 16h

It Just Works

Cherub @polygoncherub.bsky.social · 22h

This is the hill that I stand my ground on.

Best game design:

Reposted by ari velazquez 🌯

dr. hazel 🐝 @hazelmonforton.com · 18h

Sadly, my contract with Blizzard ended in September. That means I'm looking for fulltime or contract work as a senior writer or narrative designer. If you need someone who can write sharp characters, poetic prose, and emotional stories, I'm available! www.hazelmonforton.com

dr. hazel 🐝 @hazelmonforton.com · Jul 8

It's #portfolioday! I'm presently a senior narrative designer at Blizzard, but before that I was at Bungie and Arkane. I wrote for the Writer's Guild award-nominated Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, and a bunch of critically acclaimed seasons and expansions in Destiny 2.

A scene from the High Heresy cinematic in Destiny 2: Heresy (2025)

A scene from the Safiyah cinematic from Destiny 2: Season of the Haunted (2022)

A scene from the final mission in Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (2017)

A cutscene featuring the Outsider from Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (2017)

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 17h

meet me at the halo LAN in the black lodge

KupoBeat @kupobeat.bsky.social · 1d

halo time

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ari velazquez 🌯 @arivelazquez.com · 17h

saw 2/3 of the talks and loved em ✌️ glad you made it out here!

Reposted by ari velazquez 🌯

the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 1d

In 2004, Parisian police were conducting a training exercise in the french catacombs and found, after moving past a desk and a tape playing audio of snarling dogs, a fully functional movie theater and bar. When they returned 3 days later, the equipment was gone, with a note: “Do not try to find us.”

Members of the force's sports squad, responsible
- among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.
Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.
Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.
A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.
"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."
Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

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☆「ＹＡＳＥ」IdolismJ ☆ @idolismj.yase.world · 1d

That green base wasn't the only color that ended up looking washed out in the final design

Fighting-Games Daily @fgcdaily.bsky.social · 1d

🎨Bayonetta's character designer, Mari Shimazaki made Miary Zo's Costume 03!

“The combination of a green base with red accents was inspired by the Madagascar flag, and from an early stage onwards, a white inner layer was incorporated to highlight Miariz's dark skin.”

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Low Poly Depression @polydepression.bsky.social · Aug 27

Incredible Crisis ad from 2000 telling players to buy the game or else their technical director is going to kill himself

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