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A Year Spent Looking at One Room

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There was a point today where I was working on a new object for our new game, appropriately titled 'The Caveman Idea' in my unity project folder, that I had realized it had been over a year since I had written down the initial concept. I really can't believe how it's been that long, but the date of the files on my google drive that I hastily wrote at 2am last August confirmed it. It's interesting to me how addicted I can get to ideas that I just happen upon. I don't have much of a discovery for what to do next, and I don't have any kind of wise philosophy about how to find the next best creative invention, nor do I think I'd be the one to execute on that. But really, if I had that kind of self-confidence, I probably wouldn't have been up at 2am on my phone. Really, the idea is probably a reflection of games I was playing at the time, my anxiety for performing well at my new job, and/or just wanting to play something that didn't totally exist the...
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Dev Diaries 1: Shaders

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Shaders.   Why am I looking at shaders? I guess it must be that time of year again. The time where the sun starts to stay out a little longer, birds occasionally ruin my car, and most importantly, the time where I have to come face-to-face with creating custom shaders inside of a 3D game engine.   I hate shaders. I don’t even like the word. Shaders . The syllables give me shivers. It taunts me like a kid giving me the side eye at a spelling bee after he gets the word 'tessellation'. I hate that kid. Alright, maybe hate is too strong of a word. I like to think, often in situations like these, frustration is rooted in a lack of understanding. So maybe I just don’t understand shaders, and when I do understand them, I’ll love them. Maybe I'll date a shader, get married and we can name our firstborn 'Volumetric' or something like that. It’s unlikely. So how did I end up here? Too much curiosity I suppose. I assume due to a bad upbringing or too much sugar in my diet. B...
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Unreal Project Prototyping

  In Project Gradual, the biggest hurdle that needed to be dealt with was the rotation of the ship. So, early priority centered around creating a prototype to get an idea of what variables we could tweak to get in the right ballpark. Early on, it was important to create a prototype that would simulate the intended “anti-gravity” look from 90’s-00’s racing games that we used as references like F-Zero and Wipeout. After a lot of iteration and even more balancing, a final algorithm was designed that matched the project’s vision. How I visualize the way in which it works is to imagine an object in 3D space that is magnetized to the surface of a sphere. Wherever the object travels, it always does so along the surface of the sphere, not unlike somebody walking along a planet’s surface. As it travels, it inherits the rotation of the object it is placed against meaning every time it moves forward, its trajectory for where it is applying its movement changes. So to accomplish this effe...
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