GDC Europe diary

I heard a story about how a certain indie developer fled from an angry mob.

He and a friend wanted ice cream, so they went to a remote island famous for ice cream.

Unfortunately, he ended up punching a clown in the face for some reason.

It was implied that the clown was particularly beloved by the small remote town specializing in ice cream, so a large mob quickly formed to attack said indie designer.

His friend jumped on a nearby motorcycle and started speeding off.

The indie designer ran after the motorcycle, just barely jumping onto the back. They escaped, but they never got any ice cream.

BRB. GDC Europe.

Blog updates are on the backburner for this week... I'm currently in Cologne, partying the only way Europeans know how / crunching on the last touches on my slides. I recently ran through the whole thing and I came in at just under 50 minutes, so I'm pretty happy with how it's going.

If you'll be at GDC Europe, come see my talk on Tuesday at 5:30 in Congress Saal 2, 4th level. I don't know if I'm getting recorded, but if I am I'm sure it'll be in the GDC Vault or something.

Wish me luck!

The flat as art; the aesthetics of UV maps.

So the celebration of visual arts in video games like "Into the Pixel" is cool in one sense, but a little dishonest in another -- concept art is not video game art -- that is, it's not the art asset that goes into the game. Rather, I'd argue that the more authentic video game art is the sprite sheet, the texture atlas, the lightmap, the UV map. It's all about the flats. Understanding them requires understanding games on some level. ("UV means ultraviolet, right?")

I propose three aesthetics / three approaches to appreciating the flat:

"In Ruins" by Tom Betts

"In Ruins" is a first person procedural platformer-explorer thing. Spoilery critique after the jump:

How to dig holes in Unity3D terrains.

UPDATE FOR 2019: This post is 7+ years old, and new versions of Unity have updated the Terrain system. In principle, this technique should still work -- but the specific code and variable names are probably broken. I have no plans to update this post. Good luck.

Say you're making a Unity game that takes place in a large landscape dotted with windmills, and some of these windmills have tunnels that lead underground. But in Unity, the terrain collider is generated from heightmap data: it's essentially one giant bumpy plane. You can't punch holes in it.

Can we hack it to achieve the same result? Yep. Here's one way, there are two parts to it:

1) Hiding a piece of terrain geometry with a "depth mask" shader.
2) Disabling the collider so the player (or whatever) can pass through the hole, but collides with terrain other times.

If you need more detail, here's my specific implementation:

On "Gaymercon"

The main perpetrators behind pushing "video game players as a political identity," or the existence of "gamers," are the industries and companies who seek to profit from it. I have no objection to corporations interacting with politics as long as those interactions are visible and transparent -- but the "gamer" was invented, and is still largely owned, as a marketing ploy ("Buying Call of Duty is a form of personal expression!") and if you believe otherwise then you're fooling yourself at the behest of whoever makes these incredibly patronizing ads.

However, I'm content to let that discourse exist, far from the indie / academic / game design scenes where I frequent, where no one uses the word "gamer" unironically and if you do then it marks you as an outsider and you feel awkward as the room visibly chills around you and you resolve to never use the word again. (Okay some academics like the word and use it for explanatory power, my bad, I guess it's just personal revulsion on my part, then.) People who readily identify as "gamers" don't directly hurt others, so I don't really care, so do and believe what you want.

But when that word poisons something that I actually value, like a conversation about being non-straight in society -- that's when I'm not so sure about this.

The Best Unity3D Tutorial Writer In The World

I hate video tutorials; they're slow, you have to consume them linearly / it's hard to skip around, and frankly I just don't think they add much unless cursor movements really matter, as in a ZBrush DVD or something. Textbooks (like, made out of paper) also suck because you can't click on the words.

Jasper Flick's Unity coding tutorials, then, are a revelation: a short essay, written in plain language, rendered on a clean webpage with non-patronizing glossary, just enough screenshots, and code snippets that link you to the relevant documentation. Wow.

You'll learn a lot about C# concepts / syntax too, which is what makes this series especially great, a focus on general fundamentals. So many tutorials hinge on a structure like "use rigidbodies to make enemies die" but Flick is more about "make enemies die to learn how to use rigidbodies."

The impeccable structure comes at a significant time-cost to Flick, so he's soliciting donations to add more tutorials, using a pretty novel timer mechanism.

Maybe I'll chip in. I just read his tutorial on mesh generation and custom inspectors and I feel like I can take on the world now.

"Mission Improbable" by Magnar Jenssen and Rick D

It's fascinating how two of the most polished Half-Life 2 single player campaigns (Magnar and Rick's newly released Mission Improbable and Adam Foster's MINERVA: Metastasis) totally ignore the gravity gun and dispense with the most iconic piece of the original game.

The implied argument, then, is that the gravity gun can't replace the sheer killing power of the AR2. The gravity gun is a gimmick, it only gets used as a last resort -- after hordes of zombies in Ravenholm eat up all your ammo.

Or maybe we, as designers, avoid the gravity gun because we can't control it. There's no "gravity gun ammo" to ration out. We have to contrive really specific puzzle-like situations to overcome how much players loathe using it: here, pick up these mines and shoot them at the chopper, or here, pick up these sawblades, or here, pick up these strider-busters.

Some last remarks: the brushwork and custom assets in Mission Improbable are meticulous. The setpieces are large and involving. There's some strong Robert Briscoe influence in the pair's interpretation of Combine architecture. Good variation of encounters and effective use of manhacks. The car still feels like an afterthought, but there wasn't much room to expand the car portion anyway, I suppose.

Anyway. It's very pretty and very playable, so give it a go.

(DISCLOSURE: I beta-tested this mod.)