Recent content on Nishchal Bhandari
I released my first game, Twinkle Stardust’s Catnap Chaos , just over a year ago. I love reading how other devs approach building their designs, so I wanted to document the design ideas behind my game here. Part of the reason it’s taken me so long to write this up is that I’ve been trying to think of a through line or major takeaway for this post, but in reality
I don’t…
As your Godot project grows, it’s incredibly important to keep your code and node structure organized to avoid it from resembling
a particularly notorious kind of pasta. The Godot best practices recommends having scenes that are singularly focused and loosely coupled. How can we achieve that in practice? In this article, I will explain
what is often called the Component pattern and…
Shaders can be a mysterious topic for game developers not yet familiar with them. And seeing some of the wild things people can create
with them (for example, on Shadertoy ), they can even be ominous. It’s a whole new language and framework you have to learn in addition to Godot! 
 In this tutorial, I want to breakdown the process I used to create a simple procedural eyebrow shader…

 The above image is alright, but it has a big issue: the water, which should be the main subject, does not stand out. Instead, the diffuse lighting of the image draws attention to the sky and rocks. How can we draw more focus to the waterfall? 
 One technique we can use is “dodging and burning”, where we make selective tonal adjustments to parts of our image. In this post, I…
How do you create a responsive character controller? What does responsive even mean for this? What’s wrong with using
standard physics equation for this? This blog post will cover these questions and how you how to build responsive movement in Godot. 
 A lot of this post is inspired by great resources that you should also check out: 
 
 Math for Game Programmers: Building a…

 Pastel colors are a useful tool to have in your photography toolkit. Editing images with this style can help you take advantage of
bright harsh light, lack of shadows, and colorful elements. 
 What is a pastel color? Wikipedia says they have “high value and low saturation”. With paint, you can achieve them by “mixing white” with your standard colors. But how…

 I recently came across an article about the halation effect in film (check out that article if you are interested in a description of the effect). I wanted to
emulate the effect using darktable, and thankfully the Diffuse or Sharpen module that was released in darktable 3.8 makes this pretty easy. 
 The method I will describe below is heavily based on one by one of the authors of the…

 A while ago, someone asked online how to recreate the look of sanghan .
Here is my attempt at showing how to do this using darktable 3.6. 
 
 Here is the end product of the edit. I found this image on Signature Edits 
 
 Here is our starting point. Notice that the conditions are similar to the images we are using as inspiration. It’s a lot easier to achieve a look…

 Project Page 
 Concept 
 img-ditto is a small python script with a command line interface that allows you to transfer the color style from
one image to another. It works by using the histogram matching technique on the channels of an image. Typically the
technique is used to equalize the intensity of an image to improve contrast, but I’ve found that the method…

 Abstract 
 The Kinect has encountered widespread use in the areas of 3D mapping and computer vision thanks to its low cost,
portability, and depth sensing capability. Unfortunately, its depth sensor has a maximum range of eight meters,
and past four meters it tends to be very noisy. This work presents an approach to augment the Kinect with the ability
to estimate the data…

 Project Page 
 Concept 
 Secret Wizard Corporation is a small prototype game designed and created in two weeks by Nishchal Bhandari, Isaac Rosado, Pravina
Saratunga, and Rachel Thornton for the MIT class CMS.611/6.073 Creating Video Games. The game is designed as a flow puzzle
game with the addition of magical powers to help when players get stuck. To be successful, players…

 Project Page 
 Concept 
 walltime is a small python script with a command line interface that can set the desktop wallpaper to an image
based on the time of day. walltime chooses an image semi-randomly that fits with the time of day. walltime works
by mapping the 24 hour clock to a color gradient (currently the viridis colormap in Matplotlib), and then finding…