Souvenir and abstraction.

I was the main artist on Souvenir and did the bulk of environmental modeling / level design / art effects. The cypress tree and archway were one of the very first things I made.

Back in September, we realized that if there were any limits on what Souvenir would look like, it would probably reflect my own personal limits as a novice 3D hard surface modeler, as well as my partners Ben and Mohini who weren't incredibly experienced artists either. (Know thyself!... and judge others, I suppose, too.)

We needed an art style that would emphasize simpler forms with very little surface detail, and we made a very early decision to pursue a papercraft / untextured color direction. Otherwise, the UV mapping required would be time-consuming and cost prohibitive and wouldn't really look good anyway because I'm not a great painter. There were also huge performance gains in using just one small palette texture for virtually every environment mesh in the game; that means Unity can batch all the polys efficiently and reduce overall draw calls.

Our early experiments with the mechanic indicated that falling / shifting over long distances felt good... Which meant that our final game world had to be huge, and that most of the world would be experienced from afar as silhouettes and shapes. (Again, our mechanics suggested that investing in surface detail was pointless.)

Stuff I'm Working On, GDC 2012 Edition

Souvenir is a group MFA thesis project at Parsons about exploring your memories and holding onto the ones that mattered most. You start disoriented and overwhelmed, figuring out how to walk on walls and ceilings, but eventually you get the hang of it and start sorting stuff out. We started with Portal as our template, but eventually we came to dislike how everything felt so designed -- go here, go there, find the next step someone intended for you to find... For a more "organic" feel we started building areas around ideas instead: nature, school, and religion.

Zobeide, meanwhile, is a collaboration with sound designers Robin Arnott and Eduardo Ortiz. It's my super secret Proteus-killer. (... Well, not really.) In it, you build cities on top of other players' cities, chase naked women through moonlit alleys, and listen to the music that results. It is also an experiment with combining first person interfaces with hypertext, as a literary ode to Borges' Calvino's "Invisible Cities."

CondomCorps XL did pretty well at Jaime Woo's queer games show in Toronto. Apparently it's going to be on a Canadian TV news program too, or something? I'm going to do some more interface tweaks, add a silly campaign mode / narrative, and then call it done. I'm aiming to mirror the final feature scope of "Fear is Vigilance"... well, maybe half of that.

Radiator 1-3 might get dusted off. When I talked about it a few months ago at SVA, it reminded me how much I liked working on it sometimes. Maybe the San Francisco air will do me some good.

If you want to see any of these at GDC (or at the associated parties) come say hey at me, especially if you're a big important games person. Also, if you'd like to give me a job when I graduate, that'd be nice! My portfolio is here.

Jersey Shouroboros

The full write-up of "Jersey Shouroboros," me and Eddie Cameron's Global Game Jam 2012 entry, is up and over at Altercation blog. Check it out, along with some juicy gossip / dev anecdotes. Oh la la!

There's a link to the Unity Web Player build there, which you're welcome to try, but I really (really really really) recommend plugging in a PS3 or X360 gamepad to play it because apparently analog sticks are really important for feeling like an infinitely long serpent god / TV producer devouring Italian American reality show stars from Long Island but who moved to New Jersey. Who knew?

The joys of using world space / procedural UVs for Unity3D

NEW, 9 July 2013: I've detailed a different implementation of the same effect, better for texturing smooth bumpy surface / terrain, in another post -- "A Smoother Triplanar Shader." I still think this way is good for some things too, though.

One of the greatest benefits of old Quake-lineage BSP systems is managed UVs for world geometry; move your polygons wherever you want, and let shaders texture and tile them properly. It lets level designers focus on building, and frees environment modelers to focus on geometry rather than the mundane work of UVing and texturing yet another concrete wall.

If you're an indie developer doing the work of both, well, any shortcuts are welcome. And if you're not thinking about these things, then just ask yourself whether the player's going to look at this thing you're modeling for more than a few seconds. Just use a block and let the engine worry about it.

If you're an actual graphics / shader programmer, you can do pretty nifty stuff with this technique: Tom Betts at Big Robot is working on a not-Minecraft, and talks about using "voxel skinning and virtual texturing" which sure sounds and looks rather pretty. It's kind of similar to what Valve used for the caves in Half-Life 2: Episode Two -- let the computers do math and walk away!

But I'm not Mr. Betts, so I'm using a much more pitiful and simplistic thing.

Here's the shader I've been using for my projects, slightly modified from something I found on Unity3D Answers a long time ago. I found it after a lot of fruitless digging through significantly worse implementations -- one editor script destructively re-UV'd all the meshes in your scenes, the other script did some weird thing with material offsets -- just leave that all at the door and use a shader-based solution, trust me.

Tales from Zobeide

The biggest bottleneck for city generation right now is time; it takes 80 seconds for 2800 buildings. I guess I can just delay the player and make them watch a lot of loading screens? I'm also hoping a "complete" city will have at least 4000, which will probably be about 1.5 million polys -- but they're among the cheapest type of polygon to render, so it'll hopefully be okay. Draw calls seem under control too; I'm merging entire city blocks as combined meshes. (And I'm testing on an integrated card, so it should be fine.)

Postcard from Yorda

Started working on an Ico-ish game on a whim, now I have a half-finished monster -- all because I have to prove to Unity's Flash export that I'm not going to let it beat me with it's half-implemented functions and dozens upon dozens of undocumented bugs.

Right now I'm just improvising a giant castle thing, and then I'm going to sprinkle some gameplay in there or something -- I've left some empty spaces for puzzles, whatever those will be. Try out the v0.3 prototype here, which'll probably be the last public prototype since so much of this one is about novelty:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19887116/yorda/03/yorda3.html

(click to walk, double-click to run, or just sit back and let the pathfinding work its magic)

Postcard from Zobeide

Zobeide is going to be a hypertext FPS about the danger of desire. I have a decent interface with Twine working, but the seamless level-sharing has been kind of a technical roadblock, with the Playtomic API randomly deciding to fail sometimes. Now I'm thinking I need to have a generic backup city to load in case it can't reach the servers. Next, I need to model some more buildings and think a bit more about the interaction / aesthetic.

0 Hour Game Jam: "Apollo 2"

Because daylight savings time ended and was rolling back an hour, a bunch of people decided to make a game in "zero hours." The full results are here. As for my entry, I clicked the "get theme" button and got "moon." So I made Apollo 2. Take a few minutes to play it in your browser over here. Missed out on the fun? There's always next year...

UPDATE, 8 May 2017: due to this game's only super-fan's special request, this has been ported to WebGL. You can now play it here on Itch.io.

Cross-post: Dinner Secrets

Over at the "Altercation" blog, I've written a post about me and Eddie Cameron's attempt at a Kinect game for a game jam. It's Happy Days themed and the game is rather silly. I also muse about the state of Unity3D-Kinect technology and some user interface concepts we learned while making it.

It's Altercation Time.

www.itsaltercationtime.com

Me and Eddie Cameron are now formally releasing our Unity3D stuff as a dynamic duo: "Altercation." The plan, I think, is to go back through our other stuff and polish those up to spec too? Maybe?

Our first official game is a more polished build of our most recent game, "Super Cult Tycoon 2: Deluxe Edition," now updated to version 1.0 -- with better difficulty ramping, some more graphical fanciness, and exponentially more playability.

+1 branding.

Super Cult Tycoon 2: Deluxe Edition (alpha v0.9)

An RTS collab with Eddie Cameron (@eddiecameron) in your web browser, made for Super Friendship Club's "Mysticism" pageant.

Control your very own cult in Colorado; brew Kool Aid, sew wallets, build PR agencies, summon amorphous capture spheres, construct monoliths and ward off those pesky FBI agents -- then run off with the money. We were kind of aiming for a tycoon / tower defense / DOTA kind of game, and it doesn't really work as it should yet.

It's still pretty crash-prone, but pretty playable for the most part. Give it a few minutes.

http://www.superfriendshipclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=366

Unity3d web player required, 3.5 mb. Textures from cgtextures.com, sounds from freesound.org

What I've been up to...

For my thesis, a group project with two fellow students, we're making a first person game. I'm pushing for some sort of first person VVVVVV game, which doesn't seem to have been done yet for some baffling reason (other than that fake video of VVVVVVX floating around!)

Or if it has been a real game, please tell me so I can steal level design ideas!... Doing a simple Mirrors Edge aesthetic for now because we're still in prototyping stages, but we'll probably border on some kind of realism because flat solids are too disorienting right now.

A game with Eddie Cameron for the Super Friendship Club's Mysticism pageant, a top-down-ish tycoon game where you manage a cult in the great American Midwest. Just don't let the FBI catch you!

Modeling stuff for Radiator 1-3. This is Emily Dickinson's lamp, based on a photo from some Harvard online archives. Basically the idea is that all of Emily Dickinson's in-game possessions will be based on her actual stuff. My hope is that eventually an Emily Dickinson scholar plays it and freaks out a little.

Scrapping previous plan for PlanetPhillip's GravityGunVille compo (an Ico-inspired / Chirico / Barragan romp in some ruins) when I realized I had a map with no combat mechanics, and a non-map with combat mechanics, so why not combine the two? Resurrecting an old favorite of mine here. We'll see if I make the deadline.

"Detail trees," a terrain hack for forests in fixed-perspective games in Unity3D

Me n' Eddie Cameron are working on a game for this month's Super Friendship Club game pageant on "mysticism" -- a tycoon game where you control a cult. Because you're a cult operating in the remote Midwest, we need a lush forest solution that will look okay on the web player.

Ludum Dare #21: FuhFuhFire!

For Ludum Dare #21 ("Escape"), I made "FuhFuhFire," a short Unity-powered web FPS where you set fire to a building and then rescue people from it. Do you try to rescue everyone but leave others behind?... or do you just escape alone? Dynamic fire propagation / level destruction, physics thingies and 8 different endings. Wow!

WASD to walk, SPACE to jump, MOUSE to look, LEFT-CLICK to do stuff.

C'mon, just give it five (5!) minutes of your time and play it in your browser here. Project source in all its hacky glory is here too.

So close, and yet...

Even after given a generous extra week, we weren't able to finish our game in-time for the Super Friendship Club's "Justice" pageant -- we hit a showstopping, completely bewildering bug in Unity3D that corrupts texture memory or something, but only when we build out to a web player or standalone deployment. It's very frustrating. Hopefully we'll get this sorted out and released within the next two weeks.

"Hide" by Andrew Shouldice

I'm posting this early because he's declared it "done" already: I think "Hide" might be the first (or at least one of the first) games completed for the Super Friendship Club's first game pageant, "Justice."

It's yet another Unity FPS, sure, but it twists the formula rather well -- the clever way he's done the sprint controls, the smart downsampling effect that makes Unity not look like Unity at all but allows him to stylize some otherwise roughly constructed props, and the really chilling sound design -- among many other things I admire. (I'm totally going to steal the sprint idea / the downsampling technique for my own games, by the way.)

... And that's all I'm going to tell you. It might've been too much already.
 
PC build is here and the Mac build is here.
Mac: http://dal-acm.ca/~dice/Hide/H...
PC: http://dal-acm.ca/~dice/Hide/H...

(PS: Mr. Andrew, optimize the file size a bit and release a web build!)

Justice, still.

Had to throw away a lot of level design because the layout was simply no-good. Going for a more methodical approach this time instead of the aimless free-form improv of before. Also shocked at how much more thought I had to put into constructing my assets and props; I've never had to build expansive interiors in Unity before. Even in this scene, I've scaled all the architecture way too big and now I have to compensate in weird ways.

It's going to be a photo finish for the end of August...

Justice.

2 weeks left to finish a crazy overambitious collab with Eddie Cameron. Stay tuned.

Unity for Source Modders

I still make Source mods and I like it, don't get me wrong -- there's no harm in a little experimentation though, right? Now, if you make levels for Source Engine stuff then you already have the skills to start using Unity. Think of it as learning another language and being bilingual or multilingual. Here are some general concepts from Source, their translations in Unity, and some tips:

> In the Unity editor, hold right-click in 3D camera view to enable WASD / mouse-look / noclip-style navigation, just like in Hammer. Hold "Shift" to sprint. This is probably the single most important thing for you to remember that you might not've figured out immediately.

Polonius (pre-alpha)

Against our better judgment, me and Eddie Cameron have made another Unity FPS for the Mini Ludum Dare #27, "All Talk." It's horribly unfinished because we spent most of the time playing LA Noire and going out to bars and eating amazing burgers, but hey, next time we'll know.

This game is based on the central setpiece of Francis Ford Coppola's classic espionage thriller, "The Conversation."



Here's how it works: you have three characters with microphones. Two have long-range parabolic "sniper" microphones in fixed positions, and one is on the ground to actively tail the target.

The target couple wanders into all kinds of obstacles (walls, trees, spheres, crowds) that prevents the snipers from getting a clear recording, so that's where the ground guy comes in -- he can tail them for a limited time, but then occasionally the target will turn around -- in which case he has to go run and hide.

Right now a lot of it is broken and the game doesn't work as well as it should. Specifically, it's either really hard or it's too easy if you find one particular exploit.

There's also a bunch of stuff we want to add: working gameplay, character animations, non-male character models, additional missions and scenarios, maybe a second "audio mixing" phase where you have to mix the 3 sources together before submitting to the client, etc.

Still... I think we're slowly getting better at this.

If you really want to play it, though I can only half-heartedly recommend it, the 7.1 mb Unity web player build is right here. Here are two important things you need to know before playing --

1) A yellow arrow hovers above your target for 30 seconds as an aid at the beginning of the game.  After that, you're on your own.

2) Also, keep your briefcase guy out of the target couple's LoS, or else you'll lose! They have really far LoS! Just hide behind stuff to break LoS.