A million years ago, in 2014, I was working on a game called Spacething about renovating a sentient spaceship. It contained some of my first experiments with procedural generation and really gameplay code at all you d walk around and talk to the ship and say things like make a new room here or pull [ ]
A while back I had a quick go at modding Doom 3, with a view to turning a cutscene early on in the game into a Half-Life style scripted sequence. Like most of the cutscenes in Doom 3, this one takes control of the camera in order to show you something that is happening right [ ]
today i awoke without any mental health, having been hit sorta harder than usual of late by various upsetting world news, and grief, and whatever else, so after getting a few little things done at work i took the rest of the day off, and went to the park with a view to feeding the [ ]
I guess they just had the State Of Unreal at Unrealfest, and as predicted, it was a real fuckfest full of dogshit. Unrealfest is usually a fun event, but by all accounts the vibes at this one were not great, which is what you get when your opening keynote is about the war you re declaring [ ]
Honestly, not really. Trenchbroom is a good level design tool, but it s for BSP based engines where the turn it into mesh step is a compile to .bsp, so that s not very generally applicable. If we re talking level design tools that output mesh you could use anywhere, there s basically two: Scythe and Source 2 s Hammer, [ ]
A good question, since I am forever bitching and moaning about engineers. Not many, is the answer although for most of my career I have been on the technical side as well, so some of that moaning is about stuff I ve seen being done to other designers and tried to thwart, and been thwarted [ ]
Like twelve years ago I was working on a first-person adventure game of some sort, initially on UE3 and then 4, where you d drive a car. I had an admittedly vaguer-than-it-should-have-been pitch that I tried to get funding with, and that failed, so I canned it, but it resulted in a trailer (below) that I [ ]
I think I expressed this pretty well in this post about Max Payne 3, but what I m basically talking about is games that were going for realism in the sense of what that meant at the time, but were not reaching for photographic realism, which wasn t a reasonable target in the way it is now. [ ]
An interesting question there s a lot I don t purport to know about both engines (especially Godot), so I don t want to weigh in too hard, but I will throw out some observations: Hope this helps?!?!?!
This is presumably in reference to this post: And I was, yeah! Back in like, 2014-2016 I was making a pretty cool stealth game that I wound up having to cancel for funding-related reasons beyond my control. Initially it was using pixelated low-res photosourced textures, and then later I swapped to another style, befores and [ ]
It s now been over 10 years since I started getting a reputation for bitching and moaning about the state of Level Design Tools, starting with my first talk-into-mic youtube video, Level Editing In UE4 Needs To Catch Up To Quake 1, and then a bit later the wider-ranging sequel Ruminations Upon The Insidious Ubiquity Of [ ]
The level scripting system I described building in a previous blog post is now available to buy, and it s called JoeIO, so you can use it in your games. It s for letting level designers go nuts with level scripting mostly without having to go through programmers or write code themselves. That post is now ✨documentation✨, [ ]
when i was about 7, my family bought an 89 tarago from a place called just buses . they had put a sticker on the back of it that said just buses in kind of a sexy cursive font, not as one whole sticker but a letter at a time. i peeled them off, rearranged the [ ]
a brainworm i acquired as a child: in the late 90s in australia there was some incremental upgrade to eftpos card scanners rolled out, where you d swipe your card and not have to wait as long, and every checkout for years had faded stickers on there that said swipe me now i m even faster . the [ ]
in Skyrim, Skooma is a hard drug of some sort that ruins lives, but Skyrim doesn t do anything with it mechanically, it just gives you a little bit of stamina. the item is totally out of sync with the lore! here is what i think Skooma should do in my often dreamt-of perfect world where [ ]
This week I built a Source Engine style input/output (I/O) system for level scripting in Sleight of Hand, and if you don t know what that is or means, you have that in common with most game developers. (Update: It is now available). It s an astonishingly useful thing to have on any game with level scripting [ ]
I haven t played Team Fortress 2 in years and years, but I think of the map tc_hydro pretty often, at once launch-TF2 s least popular map (apparently) and, I reckon, its finest hour aesthetically. So much effort and enthusiasm went into every corner of this map, often in ways that on the Source engine were pains [ ]
A tool I made a long time ago with a little help from the excellent Turfster is my Vector Field Painter, made to be used in VR. It s a standalone application that s basically a VR game where you use your hands to paint direction and magnitude into a 3D vector field, preview the result using [ ]
In the early-mid 90s my dad ran a PC repair business, which I get the impression he spun up in advance of knowing much about PCs and more or less learned on the job. I remember that when he hit a PC he really couldn t do anything with, he d hit up a guy called Jim, [ ]
In 1997 or so, I remember that my mum could use a computer pretty good. She had a 486 and she d write, research online, copy files around on floppies, email them, save and use images. Salvage Office autosaves. Save websites so she could look at them offline. I once saw her use a null modem [ ]
Sometimes kids in their teens or early 20s rock up in my discord, and stay for years, and become adults. This only happens if they don t get banned for irritating me, and I m surprised by how often that happens. I can t imagine being cool or thoughtful or insightful at that age, but some of em [ ]
I ve been working for the last week or two on a system to streamline contextual or scripted animation stuff in Sleight of Hand, a stealth game with a lot of systemic interaction aspirations. I built an interest source system a while back for coordinated investigations and dynamic behaviours, and while some of those interactions have [ ]
I just completed Gears of War 1 Reloaded, a remaster of a remaster (lol same), and it ends with a train level. It s the usual thing, a mostly-static level pretending to be a moving train by deploying various illusions, but since it s possible that Sleight of Hand will ship with one of these, I was [ ]
I recently made a second attempt at playing Assassin s Creed: Mirage, having disliked it the first time, but they have patched it in interesting ways and this time it got its hooks in. You would think from the multiple posts I ve done about this franchise that I was a bigtime fan, and that s never been [ ]
i had a dream a while back in which i was playing a leaked build of an old cancelled deus ex game called Staves Eco, where dx s neural augmentations existed, but had had generative AI non-optionally patched in in an over-the-air update. it was concerned with the idea that, in the same way you can [ ]
I ve worked with a few target-based contextual interaction systems for NPCs on different projects, they re one of my favourite things to make, and lately I ve been making one for Sleight of Hand, a stealth game I m working on at RiffRaff, deets of which I shall here now divulge. Everyone calls these objects something different: at [ ]
An uncomfortable pattern I ve noticed in workplaces and relationships over the years is that even (what I believe to be) genuinely well-intentioned men (I only see it with men) find themselves resorting to gaslighting at the drop of a hat in relatively low-stakes situations. Specifically, I see guys trying to resolve tension by inventing a [ ]
in my capacity as a non-artist, i typically refrain from drawing any pictures. the pictures below, drawn in ballpoint pen (or some of them on an ipad), are exceptions. it s my contention that perspective is for messy bitches so as a put-together ho i don t fuck with it
about a week ago, wonderful Oscar the cat, my best friend of 14 years, passed away in my arms in the garden. i caught him as a feral kitten living under my house when i was 21, and he was the sweetest creature anyone has ever known. this week has been awful, but i m so [ ]
Some years ago I did a quest scripting tool for an ill-fated open-world game I was contracting on. It was ages ago now, the project s concluded, and nothing here identifies any of it, so I m sure nobody ll mind if I talk about my approach a bit here. My number one concern when creating tools for [ ]
Many years ago when I was a tiny baby making InFlux (of which there is now a Redux), I had no idea what I wanted to do with it narratively, if anything. Because, from a young age, he had humoured me, I emailed Gabe Newell about it, knowing he was in the habit of either [ ]
yeah so i was playing no man s sky once and i was on a space station and suddenly every vert s position on one of the horizontal axes collapsed to 0 and it looked like this. i could see dudes running around. cool bug
this is my favourite kind of spider because it visibly goes on adventures and this i feel is a very good example of that. you can see the thought process. she is vibing if you watch for a while you will see her see a leaf standing on end like a tower and be like [ ]
I ve written before about even though I m a huge longtime Remedy enjoyer not liking Control very much, but wanting to like it. Well, good news! After years of trying to like it, I finally like it. Here I will share with you the secrets, for there are several, to Liking Control If You [ ]
The Weird West side project (called Overdrive) that I started working on some time back is something I rarely find the time to advance, despite having a lot of ideas about, but lately I have a little bit. The other day I smashed out a conversation system! I really love the result (video below) [ ]
The recent Metal Gear Solid 3 remake uses a lot of Quixel Megascans (a mostly-free library of ultra-high-fidelity photogrammetry), which I don t think matters at all in itself, but it s funny that the bit of wood Snake bites down on when he splints his elbow is 100% identical to a plank you roll over all [ ]
As my Ass Creed quest continues, I ve now played through 1, 2, Brotherhood, Revelations, 3, 4 (Black Flag), and Unity, the whole Desmond Trilogy and then some. Here are some thoughts about each of those! Playing them in quick succession like this feels like overhearing an argument someone wants it to be about this, [ ]
So the short answer is I don t think I even faced the hurdle you re talking about. What happened for me is that as soon as Steam Deck Compatibility became a thing, this button materialised on my Steamworks App Admin screen: I recently found out this doesn t happen for everyone. Apparently, some people are just not [ ]
I m on a bit of an Assassin s Creed odyssey lately (not playing Assassin s Creed Odyssey, just on an odyssey through Assassin s Creed), going in a weird order I ve just completed the first game a few days after completing Unity, which is sort of the last one that s on the same train of thought as [ ]
The first feature I worked on at Wolfeye when I came on board as (what ended up being credited as) a Systems Designer/Technical Designer was the vultures. As well as being ambiently cool, the vultures play a role a bit like the rats in Dishonored, showing up when there s dead stuff around and conveniently disposing [ ]
I am once again aimlessly enjoying the Unreal level design tool Scythe, which I get to test early builds of. Here s 40 minutes or so s messing around today using Half-Life: Alyx textures. It s really a lot of fun.
A while ago I made a cool effect for Sleight of Hand, where (since you hide in clouds of smoke sometimes in this magic-themed game), we were experimenting with a type of lantern that guards could carry around and it would dispel any smoke or fog around the light. The fog is all volumetric, so [ ]
When it comes to the Steam Deck, InFlux Redux is now verified, thanks to an update I put out a few weeks ago and then several smaller updates over a few more weeks where I tweaked the size of text on various UI elements to be one pixel larger. Here s an incomplete list of changes [ ]
The physics is definitely totally different here, and that s on purpose. Here is a post about why! In the original game, we were on UDK, which was the free version of Unreal Engine 3 that didn t give you source code access, and one of the most unfortunate things about that was there was a very [ ]
I continue to spend time screwing around in Scythe. It s so fun to finally be making maps again properly in Unreal. Some of the folks in my discord took to scything on stream and a couple times a bunch of us have just chatted and scythed, it s a good vibe. All this stuff took no [ ]
So you re hiring for a technical role, and you end up comparing two people. One of them, let s call them the Layperson, doesn t have all that much relevant expertise, but comes across as thoughtful, organised, articulate and cooperative. The other one, let s call them the Genius, seems to be the cream of the crop as [ ]
So I put a little message on there like: hey if you torrent this and like it i d appreciate it if you bought it if you can , and a bunch of pirates went and bought it on itch, and some of em even tipped more than the price of the game. it was a $10 [ ]
It s true and weird that while both Half-Life games are considered influential and important, hardly any of what was uniquely compelling about them made it into anything else. It s still hard to find anything that feels like it does what they did: dynamically-chatty bit-part characters with interesting behaviours, NPC classes with specific attitudes to each [ ]
I ve been messing around in the aforementioned Scythe level editing tool for UE5, here s some of what I ve been doin
I don t love Max Payne 3, but one thing is very good in it: it s the only thing I ve seen go out of its way to make player-activated bullet-time work in multiplayer non-jankily. It takes a pretty cool approach, where slow motion gets propagated between players and objects based on line of sight to the [ ]