Last month I mentioned a shading trick I was going to try on my old Phantom Organ Player model, and in this post I explain how that worked out. In addition, there are two obscure but cool tips I’ve learned in Unity, one of which may prompt me to return to a past game idea.

Long story …

I’m not entirely sure what prompted this (possibly restlessness from being under lockdown) but this month I’ve been digging up old 3D models and animations of mine. I’ve been sprucing up old models and putting them on Sketchfab, and am planning to eventually put some (especially a…

So I’m homebound, just like most everyone else. I was actually already working remotely most of the time so this hasn’t been a huge change for me personally, but the pandemic is causing big difficulties for everyone around me. Like, say, my mom who lives in South Korea, or my sister who…

Not a whole lot to talk about this month, since I didn’t really work much on side projects. The one thing I’d like to discuss is something called “texture arrays”.

In a nutshell, a texture array is a bundle of multiple textures that are treated as a single unit by the graph…

So I’ve been experimenting a lot lately with rendering lines on the ground, for the map in strategy and tactics games. Last post I already had this effect working for a square grid, but it wouldn’t work for hex grids because it was dependent on drawing pixels to match the grid. I ended …

Merry Almost-Christmas! I normally do a blog post every month on the 25th, but I wanted to do this one a few days before then because of the holidays.

Last month I had described my plan to render border lines on the ground (think territory in a strategy game, or movement ranges for tactics games). …

A fairly brief and text-only update this month. The main thing I want to share is a kind of game called “roll-and-write“. But before I discuss that more, I should announce that I started a new job! I’m taking charge of the Unity-side of AR projects at BUNDLAR.

If you’re thinking “wait, didn’t you…

Last month I described in words how I was building a clickable map using vertex colors. Well, a reader requested I make some visuals to demonstrate what I was talking about, so I whipped up a demo in Unity and grabbed a video of my screen:

You can see a tile grid with vertex colors, and all the …

At work this past month I’ve been implementing some interesting visual tricks on a mesh-based map. While we aren’t making a game, I could totally imagine these techniques being useful for a strategy game, or maybe a tactical RPG. Let’s say you have a hex map. Well, you could easily do hexagons wit…

Quite some time ago I had posted that I was thinking of recording a few videos on the fundamental mechanics underlying computers. As in hooking up a bunch of wires and switches to a battery, and demonstrating how to do useful things with that.

Well, I finally got around to doing that! Early this m…

Still haven’t had much to blog about lately, so this may be a short post. I didn’t even make a post last month, but there were a couple interesting new techniques I’ve been mastering since my last post. One is using the stencil buffer in custom shaders, and the other is using web sockets to implem…

As I pointed out last month, I’m putting my personal projects on a hiatus for a while. Instead, I’m going to talk a bit about interesting game dev and graphics stuff that’s come up at work. Naturally I can’t blab too many details about our internal projects at PEAK6, but I do want to point out som…

I didn’t really do anything for my personal projects this month, and in fact I may be taking a hiatus from working on them for a while. As mentioned a couple posts ago, I just started a new job that I’m pretty busy with, not to mention I just had a second baby (which obviously is also keeping me p…

I teased my new project last month: a lightweight management sim in the vein of Drugwars or Urban Dead. Unfortunately the partnership didn’t pan out (no falling out, we just realized I wanted to work much faster than he did) but I’m going to keep working on this solo. Indeed, a very manageable sco…

Merry day-after-Christmas! There’s not a ton in this update, and I’m more or less continuing the theme of last month’s update: regrouping and setting up my next projects.

Unexpectedly, I seem to be onto yet another new project. I was really intending to get back to my turn-based dungeon crawler (r…

Not a ton to report this month. I released Demolo last month, which allows me to reflect on it. Meanwhile I’m gearing up to resume working on my first-person dungeon crawler. And then I’ve also been considering a little video project, so I’ll describe that too.

Demolo hasn’t been a huge hit, whic…

This is a very short update given I already said most of it last post:

Demolo is now out for Oculus Go!

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/go/1836211156444019/

View the full article

Well Demolo is currently being reviewed by Oculus, so that’s certainly forward progress. I’m hoping to release on Oct 31 but don’t know if that’s feasible. Shortly after last month’s update I submitted Demolo to their store for review, and it’s still not ready to release, so that’s very frustratin…

Man, there was a lot more to do than expected to prepare Demolo’s submission to the Oculus Store. However I’ve prepared the mass of promotional images and videos they need, so I’ll submit the game very soon, possibly this weekend.

Indeed, I probably could have submitted it the day after I finished…

As laid out last month, there are 3 main tasks in order to port Demolo from the web build to work on Oculus Go: HMD controls, adjusting the UI, and replacing mouse with tracked controller. Well, I’ve done all three, so all the main tasks are done!

Now there’s just assorted polishing left to do (mo…