Posts about game development projects and other thoughts by indie game developer Rune Skovbo Johansen.
I've published a new video about how I've made my procedural mountain forest bigger, better and faster over the past two years: Links to things mentioned in the video My previous video about my procedural mountain forest. My LayerProcGen framework and my talk about it at Everything Procedural Conference 2024. My free game The Cluster ( full trailer ), which my LayerProcGen framework was originally…
In video game development, we’re used to sound coming from single positions in space, but how do we handle sound coming from an irregular shape? Visualization of two point cloud sounds for water streams and foliage, respectively. One technique is to move a regular point audio source to the position inside a volume that’s the closest to the listener. This works fine for convex shapes, and I’ve used…
This blog post and the companion video both explain an erosion technique I’ve worked on over the past eight months. The video has lots of elaborate animated visuals, and is more focused on my process of discovering, refining, and evolving the technique, while this post has a bit more implementation details on the final iteration. I suggest watching the video first, but it’s not required. You can…
While working on a novel erosion algorithm last fall (which I'll release at a later time), I developed a directional noise function in the process, which combines various traits of other ones. Since I haven't come across one quite like this, I'll share my findings here. I call it Phacelle Noise, a portmanteau of phase and cell. Update: After discussing with two of the authors of Phasor Noise, I've…
I've actually been working on a cool erosion technique I'll post about later, but during some downtime, I had an impulse to see if I could make a basic hair shader that doesn't require any specially made meshes or textures. I ended up making three hair shaders. The shapes below are just standard Unity spheres and capsules and only a simple normal map is used; no other textures. The hair strands…
I don't know if it's because I come from a supremely flat country, or in spite of it, but I love terrain with elevation differences. Seeing cliffs or mountains in the distance fills me with a special kind of calm. The game I'm currently working on, The Big Forest, is full of mountain forests too. I've just returned from three weeks of vacation in Japan, and I had ample opportunities to admire and…
I've just returned from three weeks of vacation in Japan. Besides being great as a vacation – which was the only thing my partner and I planned for, really – it happened to also be inspiring for me as a game developer. I like to make games that take place at least partially in beautiful nature, give a sense of mystery and wonder that invites exploration, and that have environments that incorporate…
For my game The Big Forest I want to have creatures that are both procedurally generated and animated, which, as expected, is quite a research challenge. As mentioned in my 2024 retrospective , I spent the last six months of 2024 working on this – three months on procedural model generation and three months on procedural animation. My work on the creatures actually started earlier though.…
Another year went by as an indie game developer and what do I have to show for it? In last year's retrospective I wrote that apart from working on my game The Big Forest in general, I had four concrete goals for 2024: Present my Fractal Dithering technique Release my Layer-Based ProcGen for Infinite Worlds framework as open source Wrap up and release The Cluster as a free experimental game Make…
In 2022 I came up with some new ideas for what kind of game The Big Forest (working title) could be. During the year, I developed a way to procedurally create dependency graphs and also procedurally create fully playable game levels based on the graphs. In the video below you can see the prototype I had near the end. A dependency graph is a concept in mathematics and computer science which has…
The Cluster is finally released and available for free on Itch . It's a 2.5D exploration platformer set in an open world that's carefully procedurally planned and generated, and does a few interesting things I haven't yet seen in other games (check out the links for more info). Here's a trailer: My last blog post about The Cluster was in 2016 and titled " Development of The Cluster put on hold ",…
2023 was a pretty good year for me! I'll touch here briefly on my personal life, then go on to talk about the Quest 2 release and sales of Eye of the Temple, and finally talk about my new game project and goals for 2024. Personal life It's the first year since the pandemic that didn't feel affected by it. I moved from Denmark to Finland in 2020, just as the pandemic began, so on the social side it…
Unity Technologies has announced a new Unity Runtime Fee that charges developers a fee of up to $0.20 per installed game above certain thresholds. According to my calculations, it can be a bankruptcy death-trap, at least in certain cases. Shockingly, the owed percentage is unbounded to the point that the owed amount can exceed gross revenue, since it depends on installs, not sales. Update 1: Unity…
My VR adventure Eye of the Temple , that I've been working on since 2016, has landed on the Meta Quest 2! It was released last week on April 27th. Get Eye of the Temple for Quest 2 on the Oculus Store Originally released for SteamVR in October 2021, so many people have asked for it to be brought to the Quest 2 as a native app, so I'm happy it's finally a reality. The Quest 2 version was…
Today is the one year anniversary of the release of my VR adventure Eye of the Temple on Steam! It's currently 40% off to celebrate. I thought I'd take a moment to talk about what I've been up to since the release, both related to Eye of the Temple and other projects. Eye of the Temple updates In the months after the release I worked on various fixes and updates to the game. In December I added…
My VR adventure Eye of the Temple , that I've been working on for the past five years, has finally shipped! It was released last month on October 14th. Naturally this was a huge milestone for me after having worked on it for so long. And while I've released some smaller games for free in the past, Eye of the Temple is my commercial debut game. I actually did it! Wow, I say, patting myself on the…
I play games to get to explore intriguing places, while challenge and story is secondary to me. But there still has to be a point to the exploration. I don’t want to just wander around some place - I want to uncover something intriguing and ideally mysterious . But the mystery lies not in the uncovering; it lies in the anticipation, or rather the lack of knowing exactly what I might find. In this…
You can skip to the header below for the actual guide. Or stay here for a rambling preamble. I'm a skilled programmer, but I'm not a technical person. I'm not good with computers . Or at least I highly prefer if things just work, and I don't have to fiddle with settings and configurations. This is one reason I strongly prefer Mercurial for source control over Git. It has a higher degree of just…
Today is my last day at Unity. It's been nearly 12 years since I joined the then-tiny startup with ~20 employees. Now there's over 3000 and it's been quite the ride to be part of this company while it has evolved, especially with the big role it has had in evolving the whole game industry too. Lately I've been longing to do something smaller again, and so it's time for a new adventure in my work…
I've completely failed to keep up the posting in 2019, but it's not too late to write at least one post this year! Here's (almost) everything that happened with the development of Eye of the Temple in 2019! But first, let's look at what happened in the last part of 2018 after the previous post. Fall 2018 In September 2018 the game got a proper looking in-game menu replacing the old debug UI. It…
Since my last post in July where I finally got a vision down for the level design in Eye of the Temple, I've been feeling super productive adding new areas and features to the game. In August I added two new areas and in September I've been revamping the in-game UI and the speedrun mode. Only problem is I haven't kept up with these blog posts. To avoid this post getting too long, I'll cover the…
Let me talk a bit about my workflows for doing level design in Eye of the Temple since I recently had some progress in that area. I've been in something akin to a level design writer's block for a long time, being able to rework individual small areas, but unable to start the major world redesign that I've been intending for over a year. Maybe calling it writer's block is pretentious - the fact is…
It's time for a new update on the development of Eye of the Temple. Events GDC in March is well behind us and I had a great time there. Among other things, I got to show off Eye of the Temple at the European Game Showcase (and saw a lot of other cool games too). This was a private event for specially invited people from the network of the organizers. Now, Eye of the Temple has been selected for…
Last week I took a dive into the world of PR with Eye of the Temple. There is a new trailer you can see on the website eyeofthetemple.com or right here below. And Eye of the Temple now has a Steam page: Eye of the Temple on Steam If you have a Vive or Oculus Rift, and think Eye of the Temple looks interesting, you can totally add it to your wishlist on Steam now! ;) After that I took my first stab…
It seems like I didn't blog since July. How scandalous! Well, here's an update on what I worked on for Eye of the Temple since then. Presented as a series of tweets, because that's what I have time for. Note: Add blockers seem to sometimes randomly block some of the embedded tweets for some reason. Prettier background environment The cold snowy mountains didn't give the feeling I was aiming for.…