Tag: unity
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”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.
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”Short update post because Merry Christmas! Lots of work on various side projects of mine, but the only thing of note for Eschatown is that I discovered Character Creator 2D. I purchased that tool and hopefully I can rapidly create a bunch of character sprites that way, as opposed to the vector dude I mentioned previously.
We’ve just uploaded a prototype for you to download and try. Just in time for Thanksgiving!
Just go to the game’s page for both Windows and Mac builds of Eschatown: https://midhavengames.itch.io/eschatown
This version is still very early and rough, and very few sprites are in the game so far. However the writing and systems are pretty far along, so we are testing balance with this prototype. Let me know what you find!
Continue reading “Eschatown’s Prototype”The graphics in this RPG project have definitely leveled up this month, so I have screenshots to show off. Also, while the game itself is still unnamed, we came up with a studio name: Midhaven Games! I went and registered an account on itch.io
I’m now over a month into the basic RPG I mentioned in the last post, so a bunch of systems are in place. In my last post I talked a lot about the narrative system Ink, but this time I want to get back to what is a frequent topic on my devlog: procedural generation of maps. Here is what I came up with for the map of city regions:
(The weird batches of horizontal lines are actually lines of text. That’s just to test applying textures to quads strewn about the map, and will eventually be replaced with images of buildings and trees.)
newArteest developments 