Year: 2021
After seeing the most recent asset drop from Quaternius I decided to make a little game with it while on holiday. Well, I quickly realized I would need AI code for the enemy characters, so I whipped up a little demo of an AI character controlled with a state machine and waypoints.
Very brief post: I’m doing a talk at this meetup tomorrow!
I’ve started working a bit with the new Shader Graph in Unity (mostly because I’ve started using URP) so I just want to share some early observations. TL;DR I’m a bit leery of Shader Graph right now and am finding I’d rather just write the shaders manually as I have been.
Continue reading “Early thoughts on Shader Graph”I built the arcade cabinet I mentioned last month, so in this post I’m going to both show pictures and talk a bit about how it went. Here it is!
(I realize the screen is upside-down, I did that on purpose to cover a mounting mistake. The games aren’t displayed upside-down, just that plexiglass cover over the monitor.)
Continue reading “The Arcade cabinet is built”I just ordered an arcade cabinet kit! I always wanted one as a kid, but that was always way too expensive to justify. Well, now my son is old enough to start playing arcade games too, so I decided to get one for us to play two player games on.
Continue reading “My own Arcade Cabinet”So yesterday I gave my talk to the Tech Meets Entertainment meetup group. The organizer, Zach Lo, made a YouTube channel where he posts recordings of these talks, so presumably my talk will be up there eventually. I also saw a buddy from college, so that was cool! Back in college, Mike Rankin is the one who told me about the class Building Virtual Worlds (taught by this guy) but we haven’t seen each other since graduating.
Still pretty busy with my book; it’s been coming along nicely, and I’m on the home stretch now! Meanwhile, I’m lined up to give a talk in a month at a Meetup group called Tech Meets Entertainment. This group is actually located in San Francisco, but the meetings are all virtual right now. I love speaking to groups like this, and it totally didn’t occur to me that I don’t need to limit these geographically while things are virtual.
Not a lot to talk about this month, since I’ve been pretty swamped between work and my book. One interesting new thing is I setup a Twitch channel. Manning (my publisher) asked me to stream some live coding on their channel one afternoon this summer, and so I had to setup a Twitch channel for them to invite. I may use that to stream some game dev on my own, not sure, we’ll see!
A classic rendering problem in realtime 3D graphics is overlapping transparent surfaces. Well, I recently wrote a shader for Unity that renders alpha transparency with correct depth sorting. My solution isn’t unique, but I don’t see a lot of people talking about it, so hopefully this will help people out.
The depth sorting in this shader still only works well for hard-edged cutouts, but you can mix cutouts with smooth semi-transparency in the alpha channel, and any rendering glitches will be restricted to only the semi-transparent parts. This is a huge improvement over having those rendering glitches apply to the entire model, and hopefully my explanations give you a full appreciation for the tradeoffs being made.
Continue reading “Transparency with Depth Sorting”I finally started on the 3rd edition of Unity in Action at the end of last year, so between that and work I don’t really have much bandwidth lately for any other projects. I haven’t abandoned Eschatown, but I’m probably not going to do any work on that game until spring. At that point I’m planning to quickly wrap up the art (especially character sprites done with Character Creator 2D), and then release it.
Continue reading “Discovering Sprytile”
newArteest developments 