Robert Vinluan

@robertvinluan.bsky.social

220 Followers 390 Following

Lead Product Designer, New York Times Games ✰ Art, music, and code the rest of the time ✰ Karaoke Disney Prince✰ 🇵🇭

Gilles from Belgian De Mol S14 in a BTS video playing NYT Games
Adam and Ben in Taiwan from S17 of Jet Lag: The Game
One playing Smash or Pass is critiquing hot & unattractive faces (5)
A blank 2025 full year calendar.
A shirt from a game of Tee K.O. with a badly drawn picture of a Poliwhirl and the text "I'll have what she's having".
The band RV (Robby, RJ, Rob, Bobby, and Roberto) dressed up as the members of the Saja Boys (Baby, Mystery, Jinu, Abby, and Romance) from KPop Demon Hunters
An illustration of a person in a Hornet costume helping a child in a Knight costume keep their balance.
A new rule: slap when two cards in a row are the same rank.
Sticky Hands: A new game from Robert Vinluan
A card on a table reads "Tomorrow". A sticky hand toy slaps the card and drags it out of frame.
You know how in animation, especially older cartoons, like Scooby Doo for example, you can tell the difference between the static painted background and the objects that have to animate which are inevitably colored or drawn differently? And how that can spoil the surprise a little bit, like you can tell the monster is going to jump out of THAT locker because of the way it looks? Blue Prince is the polar opposite of that. It’s a game where every single thing in the house seems like a painted background: static set dressing that doesn’t move and can’t be interacted with. But then you’ll solve a puzzle and an entire wall that has been there the whole time will open up and reveal something entirely new—and then you realize that could happen with literally anything, and it does.
Jack of clubs card depicting two hands holding sandwiches.
Jack of hearts card depicting two hands touching.
Jack of spades card depicting two hands giving the rock devil horns.
Jack of diamonds card depicting two hands wearing baseball gloves.
The rank 3-10 cards in a deck of playing cards with different layouts for the design of the card centers
Isabella Rossellini's character from Conclave cut out and composited on top of a bokeh background
Beeatrice, the mascot of Spelling Bee, wears a little birthday hat.
Andor Season 2 Episode 1: One Year Later
Children's toys from the 90's (maybe?), shaped like a hand on a string (the whole thing is one piece though) that are squishy and stretchy and usually a little bit sticky. You fling the hand at things and then they stick to them.
Complete the lyrics: 1. Third Eye Blind: “I wish you would step back from that ___ my friend” 2. Semisonic: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s ___ " 3. Prince: “This is what it sounds like when ____ cry” 4. Nat King Cole: “___, is for the way you look at me” 5. Billie Eilish: “I’m the bad guy...___.”
"Cory Booker Filibuster" can be sung to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song
The Spelling Bee on April 1st 2025 has Beeatrice wearing a Jester's hat
The very first thing you ever do in Indika is fill up a well. As weird as it might sound, this sequence is one I must not spoil for you, as it’s a perfect encapsulation of what Indika is: a game that uses its own systems to question the very concept of game systems themselves. It belongs to a short but very important list of games that poke at things many game players take for granted. Dear Esther, the popularizer of the walking simulator, asked what amount of player interaction you needed to qualify as “gameplay”, and The Stanley Parable looked at the tension between player agency and the rails and boundaries set up by the developer. Indika asks us to consider why we do things in games: is it simply because the game tells us to? Because we’re given large text on the screen that says what our Quest is? Because we’re promised a reward at the end? And it asks us to think through those systems by drawing parallels between itself and a different game, one that many of us have experience with: religion.
A screenshot of reaching 100% completion on LOK Digital.