Little Polygon Game Dev Blog
On the latest Nightshift Galaxy weekly dev stream I demonstrated the specialized level editting tool I’m building inside the Unreal Level Editor that I’m calling Scaffold . I gave an impromptu introduction to my motivations and inspirations live, but on reflection the topic deserves a written deep-dive. In designing tools I’m guided by three high-level goals: Productivity . As a…
As I transition from developing systems to developing content, a larger ratio of my programming time is devoted to AI programming. Note: I’m discussing classical game AI – how NPCs make decisions – not the overhyped odious tech-fad of the same name. Most recently, I coded the logic that pilots enemy jets: how to fly, when to turn, how to avoid obstacles, when to react to the…
Unreal Engine applies the aspect ratio of the viewport to a fixed Horizontal Field of View. Therefore, switching from standard 16:9 to ultrawide will crop the top and bottom of the view and zoom, rather than revealing more to the left and right as you’d expect, and shrinking it to 4:3 creates an extreme fisheye effect. Unreal Default: content on the sides of the viewport is fixed, causing…
I can’t believe how long it’s been since I wrote for the blog! My time has been fully-committed to an ambitious project to get funding to launch a new game studio. Spoiler alert : 2024 was a bad year to try and start a studio. 😩 What follows is a post-mortem – including receipts – to pull back the curtain on this shadowy part of game development, as a service to enthusiasts and other indie…
Hey everyone, sorry for the posting delay, but I’ve been focussed on my game for the last two months, and now I have a demo build, which I made for Glitch City LA x GUMBO NYC ! Player Mechanical Design by Evan Palmer . I’m still working on Part 3 of the Locomotion Series , and hope to resume regular posting soon, as well as reveal other exciting project updates!
In Part 1 we took care of the preliminaries, setting up our assets, and getting a base layer root and hip motion going on which to start grooving. In this part we’ll take the next step and start stepping. One of the famous Eadweard Muybridge photos. First things first, to simplify things, let’s refactor our code for the legs into helper structs so that we don’t have to copy-paste…
This is the first article in a series on implementing procedural locomotion. I’m going to walk through step-by-step generating walkcycles for a pair of robo-pants . Part 1 will mostly be setup and preliminaries, but we’ll at least go far enough for the gestures to start exihibiting personality. Download the model , if you’d like to follow along. Character locomotion in games is…
This is my second article on procedural animation. This time I’ll break down a simple “trailing” effect, for joints which “hang loose” and trail behind the primary movement. This is a subtle effect which can create a physical feel without too much actual physics. Wings trailing behind the character to create secondary motion. I use this to produce layered secondary…
Procedural animation is a priority on Tiny Starpilot. As a designer, I like how it it improves the responsiveness and “juiceness” of interactive characters. As a programmer, it’s my area of professional expertise. Finally, as a solo dev, it lets me create more “modular” assets which can be shared between characters with different skeletons. The biggest tool in the…
I’ve begun consolidating my various demos and prototypes into a single Unreal Engine project. A big feature to resolve with this port is how collision is handled. Let’s discuss collision handling in general, and how to start implementing it in Unreal in particular. This will be a code-heavy post (C++). The gang is looking pretty Unreal. In my Unity-based Character-Control demo I…
I’ve planned for three playable pilots since my earliest prototype. The design goal is straightforward: approaching the same mission with different pilots who handle differently increases replay variety. It also acts as a difficulty handicap for casual or hardcore players to opt-into by choosing particular easy or challenging pilots for particular maps. This week I was feeling ambitious and…
I designed and prototyped the missile attack! The math was clever and I want to show-off! Let’s talk about cubic bezier curves , perlin noise , and rotation minimizing frames . Doing Ichirō Itano proud. I’ll keep this article a little lighter on code. I really want to focus instead on the geometry. Many people are intimidated by math, but keep in mind that you don’t need to…
I’m adding an Itano-style Missile Circus Attack right now, so let’s talk about the principles of a high-performance bullet-hell system. Four thousand bullets ought to be enough for anyone. Computers are fast . Your Nintendo Switch has four 1.02 GHz ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores, each one 500x more powerful than the computer which sent us to the moon . So why is it slow to spawn a few…
Let’s take an art-dive into the inspiration and iterations on Tiny Starpilot’s transforming player jet/robot. Like many venerable 3D games before me, my character started as a block of tofu. physical-character control + map-splines integrated into a spline-flying state :) #gamedev #ScreenShotSunday pic.twitter.com/zPfcGAqqZG — Max! (@xewlupus) November 18, 2019 I’m…
Experience has made me opinionated about implementing 3rd person cameras. People naturally, but naively, think about the camera as a second actor in the world, following the player around (like Lakitu in Super Mario 64). Lets discuss an alternative perspective, where you consider instead the player on the 2D picture plane (with code!). We can rebuild him . We have the technology. A big shoutout…
I juggle a dozen little side-projects which I dust off from time to time. Tiny Starpilot was a minigame I conceived of years ago when I was freelancing between jobs, and considering the possibility of becoming a one-man-band mobile game developer. The design was simple: hold the phone sideways and slide your thumbs along the side to act as tank-tread controls. Your ship would autofire on a regular…
I’m a professional game programmer in Los Angeles. I’ve collaborated on MMOs , branded games , mobile games , micro consoles , and some prestige indie-games: ABZÛ , Solar Ash , and Hyper Light Breaker . I developed internal tech at Yacht Club Games , and now work as a freelance game/animation programmer. Little Polygon is the development blog for my side-projects, and to pontificate on…