Edzio K.
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demiurge.bsky.social
Edzio K.
@demiurge.bsky.social
480 followers 720 following 1.5K posts
Angularity and reactivity. Immersive Sim. Project Anarres developer. Anarchist. He / Him.
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demiurge.bsky.social
Fucked up anew remembering how perfectly The Brutalist (2024) was photographed.
A bearded man who has been wearied and dirtied from toil appears distraught, overcome with emotion in some modest dinner booth. His eyes red and gleaming with pain as he holds newspaper clippings and photographs. A man reaches for a glass by the windows of an apartment. Blinds segment the scene horizontally and perpendicular is the perfect vertical flare of light on the lens. It also erodes the silhouette of the man. The light of day reaches only so far in the vaulting quarry tunnel of marble. Silhouetted against the veined stone of rectilinear cut are three figures. On twilight reflecting waters, the lights and boats of Venice. Green and teal against the silhouetted forms of towers and boats. Brilliant is the gradient of the sky that hems the horizon with a deep purple.
November 23, 2025 at 4:51 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Some more exotic ammo cases.
Some protected cases for FSRM "Intelliflechette" projectiles. Gray insulated casing rimmed with a pale synthetic lid that extrudes with a cradle of Xien De Lisle produced sabot-encased recursive munitions. A flechette the size of a pencil is propelled using a sabot container and using a matrix of miniature charges and stabilizer fins, can radically recalibrate its own trajectory dynamically in flight. This enables the possibility of repeated precision fire to sub-millimeter tolerances and cover-circumventing parabolas. Each Intelliflechette costs 29,000 odoni to manufacture on Ghen. The same cases but showing the lid mechanism and posterior.
November 20, 2025 at 10:33 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Sean Penn reminded everyone that all those Oscars weren't for nothing. I'm stunned. I'm obsessed with Steven J. Lockjaw. He's an absurd character yet all these deeply human universals are expressed so vividly, drawing seemingly every military colonel of the past half-century into a platonic monster.
His weathered face strains with anger and upset as though threatening to unseam. His irises are the colour of a riverbank and would spill down his cheeks were he allowed in this circumstance. A soldier marches down a road annihilated by the sun. Blood and pulverized skin camouflages his face, soaking the pores of his arm saddled on grip of his rifle heavy with attachments, trigger discipline maintained.
November 20, 2025 at 9:53 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
So many discrete pieces of genius. Like the hydraulic dynamic of the Combine gunship's self-protecting weaponry and turning speed against a laser-guided RPG. It produces something akin to a remote controlled aerial fight with intuitive control and all seamless to the continuity of other action.
Cliffs crowned with rolling grasses beneath a firmament bloomed white and pale blue where clouds yet bear rain. Amid these soft forms a burning exhaust of rocket fuel black bends towards a military creation, neither machine nor animal in full. Gloved hands cradle the launcher from which this fired.
November 19, 2025 at 9:53 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Viktor Antonov was a lineal inheritor of the speculative architect Lebbeus Woods. His work and insight are so tangibly and beautifully realised in the shifting, additive, subtractive, angular forms in which a final stasis is denied. Consuming. Overtaking. Combining.
The wall swallowing the city square cannot be resolved as such. Wrought of an uncertain alloy, these metallic forms recall more dark spines or the thin baleen plates that strain oceans into whales. Some angle more inward and produce a curve only to angle back out. Actuating slowly until violently clawing into the earth. Some are thinner. Others have different angles along their height. Near the base of a megastructure too vast to take even in partial measure. Angled protrusions and alien affordances are general. All disappears into clouds choked of all life and hue. Yet the perimeter of this monolith is not hermetically sealed, as though by some final gate or portcullis. It's redundant for an entire city of surveillance and control surrounds its foundation.
November 18, 2025 at 11:10 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Recalling the Normandy Landings, there's fight over beachhead emplacements, each with its own curious permutations and escalations to navigate before an Antlion-assisted jailbreak of such incredible empowerment. There could be an entire thread on how skillfully progression is varied area-to-area.
Menacing in the red of a flare, bare concrete and chitinous insect limbs of now-terrestrial fauna. Soft light from above suggests this as a bunker set into the ground. The approach to the cliff is heavily fortified with steel emplacements and spotlights that stare at the curving road. Walled with watchtowers is the crown on this headland. A light almost green attempts to circumvent rainclouds near the horizon.
November 18, 2025 at 10:43 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
One goes from limited ammo physics-based survival horror in Ravenholm to WW2-intensity battles in the apartments of City 17. Airboat chases. Playing catch with a giant robot. The sheer diversity of vignettes wrung from a such simple gameplay grammar is astonishing. The apogee of linear level design.
Fire streams from the blackened figure. Its immediate surrounding a calamity of blood and severed limbs. A wooden shed storage for tools and fuel in abundance. In hand is a ramshackle device with a glowing core aiming over these items. Seen from broken windows, before a neoclassical building recalling a parliament building or a bank highly-armoured soldiers break into formations. Above this fly biomechanical constructs or creatures grown into military use. Yet all are meagre before the tower whose cables seem to draw the very earth to its foundation. The water in the valley has long been drained. An airboat skids forward on this narrow residue as a gunship deploys spherical mines between this unarmed vehicle and a drainage pipe. More simian than its namesake, a mongrel robot construct of many parts with differing origin. Its look of affection is unmistakable. Embraced by a young woman, its clear friend. All this in a space no less irregular than Dog.
November 18, 2025 at 9:54 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Half-Life 2 (2004).

Owed a debt to replay this after last year's anniversary. It still feels unlike other games — a masterpiece of visual design and composition, its full achievements are too numerous to summarize.

I recall before release it looked like something impossible.
Grayscale contours of a grim visaged man; gaunt with the recession of skin to the bone of his skull. This veneer of a person is thin yet has never been otherwise. Superimposed is the functioning of an industrial oppression, human-sized containers sorted and moved by a schema unknown. A shambling mass of what was once a shuffles in silhouette against the inferno engulfing a square. Above on a metal railing affixed to a brick building an armed figure is starkly drawn by some interior radiance. From an abject interior, the supporting arches of a bridge are seen through a window. In coastal fog, the sky is little more than a bleached gradient towards water long receded. All this glimpsed down the sights of a .357 revolver. A train station interior rising to tall height on wrought-iron windows angled towards a gable roof. A diffuse morning light passes through one to an amber glow opposite on teller windows long closed. One has between retrofitted with an angular machine at which people queue, same in their clothing. Elevated in this light a figure, fatherly in his bearing and white hair, addresses all through a towering projection screen. Its angle downward.
November 18, 2025 at 9:54 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
The superimposition of Vineland (1990) is there and yet Anderson spraypainted something breathtaking, beautiful, urgently contemporary and transhistorical on the office walls that bequeathed him such an improbable budget for such an improbable film. I fucking love it.
Dozens of trophies, medals and honors rest on the shelf above the window in this sparring room. A black vehicle speeds in a blur outside the window in a trail of red and blue. A man in sandals at his desk glances out at the cacophony. Running across the overpass, a disheveled man in a plaid robe chance observes a neighborhood being saturated with police and the lights of their presence. A severe man with hollow eyes stares at figure beyond chainwire fencing. His face is gaunt and bereft of bodyfat and shorn of anything beyond necessity; a tuft of a fringe solely for the minimum viable utility to his unnerving countenance. The world behind the crestfallen woman is oceanic in its soft focus, dark green with streetlights and building facades reduced to motes of bright colour.
November 16, 2025 at 8:40 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
One Battle After Another (2025).

One-hundred percent kino.

📽️
Against the tufts of brush on the desert silhouette the gleaming fence, rim-lit, this phalanx of razors dissect the world. Almost occluding in this frame the soft gradient of indigo of twilight. A storefront of adumbrated lights and forms, barred with steel. A call is made from a payphone by a woman with a look pregnant with the notion that all could change by such a thing. The many hues of a vibrant street. Men dressed for war. Redundantly stitched plate carriers and camouflage patterns. In white majuscule, "POLICE" is branded on them. One has his rifle raised as if its use was imminent. By the red light of a device, a young woman's anguish is all that can be seen in the darkness of her lot. The vastness of her face is creased into sadness.
November 16, 2025 at 8:40 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
The texture is all done in PS. I generally avoid Substance Painter unless the model is exceptionally complex.
A gray ammo crate for 7.2mm x 6.5mm ammunition. Information stenciled in a green course around the enclosure bearing the marks of being moved and removed. More permanent are the laser cut alphanumerics. High velocity lead-antimony rounds with precise cavities for maximal frangible effect against soft tissues. ST. On a procurement sheet, in polite discussion, across conflict epidemiology papers, "soft tip" is used. Mass stamped in-house at the Villa.
November 13, 2025 at 12:01 PM
demiurge.bsky.social
It must be said that the pixel artistry is just remarkably cohesive and impressive — often startling with a cut to an unexpectedly detailed and unnerving facial expression or artifact. Fantastic colour choices as well.
It's eyes ablaze with orange, a cat of some years stalks across hardwood floors beneath a cold moonlight. A woman a clergyman before the bleached white facade of a small cottage, almost incandescent by juxtaposition of the gray and sodden land engulfing all to the horizon. Sheep grazing on the gray grasses of field, recalling the clouds in their careless idle. A crude and soiled doll, found unearthed in a ground tumulted by worms. Impaling a felt limb is a hairpin and the expression aghast for the injury.
November 7, 2025 at 8:13 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (2022).

One of the best adventure games I've had the pleasure of discovering; a horror triumph commendably deliberate with its gradual escalation. Recalling The Wicker Man (1973) and Wake in Fright (1971), it arrestingly sustains mystery and suspense to the very end.
The beautiful austerity of the moors stretch flat to a planewise union with a gray sky robbed of all distinction and feature. On the grasses are archipelagoes of indigo heather. All in view to a still woman seated in respite on a blue bench; erected for the few in audience of this teeming earth. Scarcely visible in the fog of the night, a woman in work clothes of the previous century's turn stands spectral in the night. Blazing light pierces through the dark from a building of stone and brick. A clergyman in his clerical collar. An abject dilation of surprise plain on his aged countenance; as though a great horror had befallen him. In a garden finely manicured, a paradise displaced, a young girl stands with her father looking at him with adoration. A small circle of mushrooms rings a segment of otherwise level grounds.
November 7, 2025 at 7:54 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Some ammo boxes I textured recently.

#GameDev #GraphicDesign
Two boxes of non-standard .223 rounds, split with tan and a deep Prussian blue coloration — on its reverse are hazard signs and a silhouette recalling a hawk; the extinct Aeternan Harron. Inside are a maximum of twenty-four soft-tissue rounds produced by Marrabelli Instruments. Three boxes of 19mm DU cartridges. A soft blue, perhaps periwinkle, is laser imprinted with the sharp angular lines of Kreiplex Dynamics. A toxic yellow marks these as using Depleted Uranium; the word chemhazard in majuscule. An Interstellar Securities & Commerce Authority stamp permits these munitions clearance through Folding Corridor transit stations.
November 3, 2025 at 6:15 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
From the demo of BIRDCAGE (2025).

Shoot ‘em ups are sadly not my forte. Previously a non-factor of my life now writ tragic given the sublime aesthetics. If there are any genre enthusiasts among my followers do pursue this.
Ephemeral. At once a sword's edge. Forms that evoke the transience of the heavens and something wrought out of a molten alloy yet undiscovered. The title screen of the "Sword Action Shooting Game" BIRDCAGE. A space station whose central column recalls a spindle. Surrounding it are halos of green light and the angelic clustering of wings, armour pieces or ablation shields. Text speaks of cleaved dominion between powers. This, the space colony of CAGE. "Destroy the WORLD-EGG." A pilot bathed in blue light save for the horizon line and targeting reticles and distance increments shining on the topography of their face. The second part of a question about the purpose of bullets... "when you wield a SWORD?"
November 2, 2025 at 8:01 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Mars Express (2023).

Among the more impressive animated works of the last decade — relentlessly introducing some novel idea, interaction, implication and complication to a breathtaking degree. I was utterly compelled from the first scene to the credits.

📽️
A man of serene confidence stares beyond a woman whose gaze is severe and an indictment surpassing what could be said. His countenance is reflected in the glass behind housing a novel organic form, cetacean with an eye that stares with knowing. Countless constructed beings ascend a pile of their kind. Robots of every make and dimension and all now heaped in sameness. There are flowers on the seat beside the driver. Above his torso is a holographic head, removed from body as guillotined and separated. Angst is plain on his face and a home with a lawn through the vast windows of the vehicle waits. A vast shuttle whose underside is the black ceramic of atmospheric heat shielding, bathed in aqua landing lights. Beneath the immense launchway, a double decked train disappears into a tunnel beneath. The polluted sky a copper gradient into darkness.
October 26, 2025 at 3:25 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
From the demo of Love Eternal (2025).

Supreme elegance — cardinal directions, jump, flip. Yet how much is wrung from this grammar becomes almost shocking. Further, gorgeous pixel artistry.
A bedroom whose dimension by multiple of the standing young woman with white hair is capacious. There ensconced in blackness, a small rectangle with all of her possessions, it's a suffocating band. The skeleton of a house that has collapsed by its own weight. A brittle silhouette against the walls of a cave that almost suggest the billowing towers of cloud that reign over a sky absent in this view. Brick has been set upon stone. Moss covers both in the foreground of a cave gargantuan to witness. The woman in the red dress is small among these forms built and organic. The contours of the cavern are conspicuous in their logic. Spikes adorn these mirrored curves and a red gem that in light bears the same colour of the woman's dress hovers impossibly between these dangers.
October 23, 2025 at 8:24 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
From the demo of The Séance of Blake Manor (2025).

Among the best surprises of the Next Fest — an investigation game with notable influence from Pathologic (2005) in having a time pressure and every life in the titular hotel at hazard. Captivating mechanically and atmospherically.
A country road of total austerity. From a slate sky a gray rain. Barren mountains through which a carriage is drawn by a blinkered horse. Recognizable within is a man of a city bearing. He's been paid handsomely to retrieve her alive. Broken lenses in their frames. A dour countenance. Pocket watch clutched in claw. The tells of intrigue on a man in reasonable attire, neither extravagant nor rough. A manager. "How fast must it have been going to break through like that, Mister Hunter?" The tall woman asks. A black crow or raven lies beneath the silhouette of a roof window's frame, jagged glass in a circle like placements in a ritual. The severe man reckons with the omen. Lightning casts the exterior in an incandescent flash, scoring the window's muntins across the room. The time approaches midnight.
October 20, 2025 at 10:10 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
WIP. Central container elevator.

#GameDev
The worn hazard paint recalls the heraldry of a different millennium, covering the obverse of two platforms horizontal from intricate tracks that stretch indefinite to a destination above. White geometric print perhaps letters or legible to a machine rise in contrast to blue paneling alongside the pale finishes of the vast mechanism and innumerable subdivisions. A closer view of the interior trackwork — redundant teeth stoppers, lattice metalwork, vented trims, access paneling, decorative painted measures, geometric insets, removable ring bolting and gray hazard tape among other details.
October 20, 2025 at 7:35 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
From the demo of Skate Story (2025).

The perfect foley of polyurethane wheels on concrete and constant musical frisson by Blood Cultures — even the wild lens effects contribute to a glittering experiential bliss. Joining the chorus of recommendation.
A plane of stars. Glittering, distorting, refracting beneath the alabaster flare of the moon. A demon of glass on a skateboard. "In the sky, but still in the underworld." The crude intrusions of face in a cube of concrete. "HappyCube" levels with the glass skateboarder, 'Look. I read one of their *thinkpieces* once.' A discourse of lament amid gray stone architecture. "The skateboard vibrated at a divine frequency." To take or back away? Blue stripes and gradients subtle and steep decorate the underside. Kaleidoscopic is the lens distortion to a focal planetoid like a hellish gas giant. The glass skateboarder balances in this radiant cacophonous light. "Performing different tricks keeps it fresh."
October 19, 2025 at 2:24 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Identical rows and columns of television screens with an ad of domesticity; snap-finger convenience. The light sears two silhouettes. A man whose long coat conceals the injury he clutches almost as desperate as his hold of a boy's hand being dragged with him. The gait of the young woman is disciplined. Determined. Unlike the teenager beseeching her attention. Behind the arcing yellow columns they walk beneath a news van is among armoured vehicles in the middle of a city of steel. A compact disc jukebox whose selector mechanism is so ornate as to be exposed beneath a viewing window; rotating actuators, a half-circle rail, a collapsing laser tracker, a pristine copper finish. The music is almost beside the point. The funicular's movement is so momentous as to recall a landslide, ejecting accretions of dust and frost on the angled track. Hemmed by a railing that betrays the platform's immensity, hazard stripes that would engulf a person circumference the elevator like the dazzle camouflage of a previous century's battleships. In a darkness greater than all.
October 18, 2025 at 11:37 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Akira (1988).

I held this in my heart as being an epochal work of animation — somehow that still felt inadequate for just how astonishing every shot was on revisit. Each a world of design and detail and appearing an unfathomable labour immediately displaced by another such achievement.

📽️
A stairway of past tense. Plastic wrappers, cigarette stumps, cans, cracks, graffiti insult, duct tape, ash stains and it was like that when I got here — a young man feels a fresh mat through the wrappings on his feet. The red light gleams a dull pink on the glasses of a driver. His car is jammed among countless others in traffic. A taped console on the dashboard suggests a taxi and all likewise ramshackle in its interior. None are moving. As though neglect had in time eviscerated the dark buildings as a pair, their intestines of metal refuse and conduits spill into an alley. Between the decay is a perfectly maintained motorcycle whose red finish is without scratch or wear. Immense are the skyscrapers that rise as though pullulating from an ancestral form. Each a citadel that now appears a mere palisade of architecture that is the sky itself. Reinforced concrete and windows that gleam gold like printed circuitry or a mail on royal commission. Of a height that their terminus is unseen.
October 16, 2025 at 6:01 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
WIP. Some recent texture experiments — trims really are everything.

#GameDev
In a hallway of antiseptic teal panels, a mechanical fixture painted in a vibrant contrast of white and cobalt. Forty-five degree insets and typographical styling where not rectilinear and salient on this stark design is the acronym "VA". A dull reflectivity on hazard stripes catch a blue light that crests to a glinting of scratches and edge wear on a beige polymer device that curves from the floor. The mechanism forewarned to caution. Intricate metal lattices and supports, a substrate for the negative space of large and metal panels that comprise the walls of a hallway. Crimson is the light that catches upon the corner gleaming of a duct of the hallway.
October 12, 2025 at 10:32 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
Afflicted with swimmer's rash so I can only look upon this jellyfish with envy.
The dome of jelly wrings itself against the current, floating above a landscape of caustic light from waves whose crests draw the countless branches of a weeping tree over a sand topography. Smug little fuckboi — I wish I could immerse myself so!
October 10, 2025 at 5:35 AM
demiurge.bsky.social
From the demo of Sword Hero (2025).

An incredible morsel that gestures towards a masterpiece somehow solo developed. The systemic riches of a Gothic (2001) or Arx Fatalis (2002) enjoined to a fighting system whose weight, consequence and sophistication leaves so much else revealed as milquetoast.
"How come you're back so soon?" The merchant is attired in regal purple in the cobblestone walls of this hold. Stars or silver bursts are scattered over his finery that does not veil the steel prosthetic where all that was his arm below the elbow was once. Tomes and swords and potions of hues various spill over the counter, the shelves, ground, all. Darius is his name. The point of the estoc rests over the shoulder as though a penance weight for a sinner to an obscure order. An iron grate is the sky above, channeling its softness into precise squares. Leaves and bushes overgrow the entrance into the arena whose opening is irregular like a gored hole. Death awaits at least one party.
October 8, 2025 at 3:51 AM