How to make stuff look at stuff / demystifying turns and rotations, and working with quaternions in Unity C#

Julia set fractal thing of a quaternion function... I actually don't really know what that means, but it's pretty.

This is kind of a blog post more for my Unity students, but I figure other people on the internet might find it useful -- let's demystify working with rotations in Unity, and explore some useful techniques for doing so.

There are 2.75 ways to store rotations in Unity: (1) quaternions and (2) euler angles (directional vectors are the 0.5, and some math functions secretly take radians instead of degrees, that's the 0.25)...

Euler angles are the typical 0-360 degree system taught in most junior high / high school geometry classes, while radians are in "units of pi" and represent the curvature of a circle. Then there's quaternions, which are scary 4 dimensional representations of a rotation that you may have never heard of / can barely spell! Fortunately, you don't need to know quaternion math in order to work with rotations, Unity will handle conversions for you.

Okay, so first let's explore a most common problem: how do you make stuff look at stuff in Unity?

Upcoming talk: "Level Design Histories and Futures" at Level Design In A Day, GDC 2015

I'll be presenting a talk on "Level Design Histories and Futures" at the Level Design In A Day track at GDC 2015, alongside other stuff by Clint Hocking, Joel Burgess, Steve Gaynor, David Pittman, Forrest Dowling, Nels Anderson, Jake Rodkin, Kate Craig, Brendon Chung, and Liz England. It's a huge honor to be associated with these people.

My talk is about level editor histories, the level designer as an industry role, level design as modernist formalism, and what a postmodern sustainable level design practice might look like. I'm kind of serving as the theory-heavy talk this year, right at the end of Tuesday at 5 PM, so I'm going to try to synthesize a lot of the previous talks together and propose some frameworks to digest them... and um I hope I'll see some blog readers there / I hope you'll still be awake at that hour!

If you can't make it to GDC, I'll try to put up the slides afterward, and I'm sure it'll be streamed or recorded or something.

Teaching game development... in public!

I remember one time in design school when a guest critic called out my classmate's project, a website to facilitate bartering. The critic balked at the idea of imposing specific procedures on how people should conduct a trade, and he talked about how the parents of Park Slope, Brooklyn shift several million tons of used toys using a very active Yahoo Groups (the class gasped in horror)... sometimes all a user wants is a message board.

So I'm one of those \Blackboard / "enterprise-class courseware learning platform" skeptics. If you've had the good fortune of never having to use one, they look like the image above, usually some really bloated outdated web portal thing with 50 different "learning modules" that 90% of university classes never use unless they're forced by the department.

As an instructor, I don't want to "setup an assignment" by digging through three different layers of menu screens! Sometimes all a user wants is a message board.

This semester, I'm running my game development courses on GitHub, Steam Community, and Tumblr. All three provide some semblance of message board functionality, so they're all suitable for teaching. Here's how I'm doing it:

Lighting design theory for 3D games, part 1: light sources and fixtures

Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, California)

Here's how I generally, theoretically, approach lighting in my games and game worlds. Part 1 is about the general concept of lighting design.

Mood is the most important end result of your lighting. The "functional school" of game lighting, which maintains that lighting exists primarily to make a space readable so that the player can navigate it and shoot people -- can be useful in my eyes but only so far as that gameplay is tactical violence, and when that violence can support evoking a mood. The rest of the time, some designers often seem content to light their spaces like a furniture catalog, or even leave it as a total after-thought. Lights can do more than show-off your normal maps and show where to walk to trigger the next cutscene, okay?

So let's begin: lighting design is a discipline that has existed since the beginning of sunlight.

"We Are Drugs: On New Indie Game Dev Tools for Psychedelic Hologram Futures" @ IndieCade East 2015

Salvador Dali, "Modern Rhapsody"

I'm giving a talk in, like, 3 weeks at IndieCade East 2015 in New York City. I'm going to be talking about art / art-making as a drug, and I'm going to show a clip of Hatsune Miku, and hopefully I'll be coherent and insightful and entertaining? And if you can't splurge for the full weekend pass, then I'd recommend at least attending on Saturday -- not because that's when my talk is! -- but rather because that's when the notorious Night Games takes place. Get your tickets sooner than later, I think there's some kind of "early bird" discount? Either way, see you around in a few weeks!

How to record animated GIFs and videos of your games with free tools

I feel like a lot of developers and artists just take some screenshots or photos to document their work, and then move on... don't! Think of your project as an engine to generate even more art.

Plus, making animated GIFs of your games and work process is fun!... and uh making videos is still a little painful, though it's a bit of a necessity for any news media or publications to talk about your game. It used to be much worse, if that's any solace? (It's probably not.)

Different Games 2015, call for submissions / session proposals

Different Games is a fantastic games conference running again in New York City on April 3-4 2015, geared toward diversity and inclusion, and they are actively soliciting game submissions and session proposals due by February 1st. Academics and non-academics, indie and not-indie, cisgender or trans or nonbinary, all are invited and encouraged to participate.

The three suggested tracks are:

Arcade: Designers interested in showcasing their game in the Different Games arcade should submit a brief overview of their game (no more than 500 words) that includes their design vision and concept of the game. In addition, please submit cover art and one or two screenshots of game play. We welcome pieces that will be in (beta) or play-testing phase as well as those further along in the development process.

Paper Presentations and Talks: We invite academics and creative minds alike to share recent work (written or otherwise) as speakers on our conference panels. We encourage participants from every field to submit writing or talks exploring topics pertaining to diversity and inclusion. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: post mortems, design methodology, reflections on playtesting, analysis/commentary on games content (theme, gender, sexuality, etc.), game reception, and game culture/communities.

Breakout or Workshop Sessions: Topic-related discussions or those exploring challenges and solutions to promoting diversity and inclusion in the broader game community/communities and other pertinent subjects AND hands-on workshop sessions geared towards learning design and development skills are both invited (Your proposal should include an explanation of any equipment participants need to experience your workshop.) If your session will be facilitated collaboratively please include bios and links for all participants.

What are you waiting for? Hurry and submit! I'll be there too, presenting a bunch of games featuring photorealistic gay dudes, as part of the Different Games NEA artist grant. See you there!

"Succulent" as hypnotizing homo hop homage

This post discusses my game Succulent and it completely spoils the ending, if you care about stuff like that. You should probably play it first.



There's a few scenes in the film Inherent Vice where you watch a man eat a frozen banana. They were unusually entertaining and not at all arousing, which got me thinking -- what if I made a game where you just watch a dude stick stuff in his mouth?

So for Succulent, I've put a fair amount of work into making this interaction feel "juicy", hooking it into particles, sounds, facial animations and "cheek physics"... here, the physicality of having his own arm do it, instead of a floating disembodied invisible player hand, was crucial to establish that he was doing it for himself and enjoying it. Inverse kinematics was finally good for something!

I borrow a lot of visual sensibilities from late period "homo hop" music videos, specifically those by Cazwell and Le1f. Both artists emphasize sweaty bodies glaring vacantly, bright backgrounds with intense lighting, and flat compositions focused on the center, evoking the go-go boy gay club / pin-up imagery that's thoroughly ingrained in US gay male culture.