Sep 30, 2020

An Intro to Graphs For Procedural World Generation

This is a pared-down transcript of the video, with important bits highlighted and separated so it may be skimmed more easily. The problem of location is often relevant during the course of any game, and it’s not always obvious how to insert gameplay significance to how the player traverses the game world. Not all games provide meaningful choices (or any choice) when transitioning between stages, levels, rooms or maps, and there’s often an opportunity for an interesting gameplay mechanic in that aspect of gameplay.

Aug 27, 2020

Designing Luck | A Guide to Loot Distributions

Loot is an integral feature of many games. A change in kit, a powerful addition to your loadout, or a shiny new fanged hat can add variety to the core gameplay loop and provide short and long term goals for players to achieve. But how is it done? This article will explain the simple algorithm behind loot distribution, exploring its underpinnings in statistics as an application of the cumulative distribution function on a discrete set of elements.

Aug 14, 2020

Isometric Games - Art, Code and Maths

After creating a small game for a game jam entry that utilized an isometric perspective, it’s become more apparent that the style is really quite interesting and further exploration would be beneficial. Since then, I’ve migrated my in-progress deckbuilding roguelike from a standard top down perspective to a more dynamic isometric one, and I’m really liking how it looks. Before After In this post, I want to consider the reasons for using and history of isometric perspectives, the complexity of building art for it, and the problem of shifting a whole codebase that references standard rectangular coordinates to isometric coordinates.

Aug 7, 2020

Make a Simple Aurora Shader in Blender

The Aurora Borealis, or northern lights effect, is surprisingly simple to recreate in Blender with an extremely basic mesh setup and a multicomponent shader. (Yes the Aurora Australis will be just as easy to make :P) Using two modifiers and basic shader construction techniques, we can divide and conquer the individual components of the aurora, and merge them together to create a stunning and stylish effect. This tutorial will go over creating the aurora mesh, and provide a node setup for the world (Making a starry night world shader) and for the aurora material itself.

Aug 6, 2020

D36 Live Changelog

This is a changelog, as well as a future goal list. Started June 05 (2020). This is a roguelite deckbuilder with a twist! It’s played on a gameboard with the extra dimension of movement. Progress to Date World Generation System Implemented based on Unity Roguelike Tutorial, flexible grid system with placement of obstacles, custom objects (enemies) Card System Functions for adding, destroying, shuffling, managing cards Card functions fully integrated in several classes Database of cards and future ideas in the Airtable deck Card template placeholders sprited Card Scriptable object setup Dynamic layout (orientation and transform) algorithm implemented Deck -> Hand -> Discard loop fully implemented Combat System

Jul 29, 2020

How to Make Damage Text Popups in Unity

Making damage numbers or damage text popups appear above a sprite in Unity, at first glance, seems like a simple one. There are definitely many approaches to this, but one must beware of inefficient, resource intensive or bug-prone solutions. Motivation - Some Bad Methods UI Animation Due to how strongly integrated text and Unity UI are, it seems obvious that a first solution is to render a simple “UIText” object above an enemy sprite - that is, a fully UI based solution.

Jul 24, 2020

Making an Atmospheric Farming Sim in 24 Hours!

Maelstrom.exe is a farming simulator controlled by console commands. You plant, grow and harvest crops to sacrifice to the Rain Sprites, who slowly bring a flood to end the age of Man. It is my submission to the GMTK 2020 Game Jam. The theme was Out of Control. maelstrom.exe by wintrmut3 Video There’s a video here about the design process of making maelstrom.exe, and it goes into a lot of the technical aspects of the game, covering the creation of the art, music and code pretty thoroughly.

Jul 24, 2020

Elements of Motion Graphics | Part 4: Adding Postprocess Effects + Video Editing

A great way to add visual flair is with Blender’s powerful compositing engine. Using it, we can create an immense amount of visual effects on top of a completed render, video clip or image, including various glitch effects, lens distortions, pixelization, scanlines, chromatic abberation and colour grading. The suite of available features can be rather overwhelming, so I made a video about adding effects one by one to create (and understand!

Jul 10, 2020

Elements of Motion Graphics | Part 3: How to Animate in Blender 2.8x + Motion Design Applications

This guide will show you how to create and work with Blender shapekeys, animation interpolation and several other techniques for motion graphics animation in Blender. It is a continuation of EP1: ATOMIC where we discuss basic modelling techniques, and EP2:DESIGN where we go over scene composition. They’re not completely necessary to go over if you’re familiar with basic modelling in Blender and the built in composition tools, though you can find a quick summary of the material at the links above.

Jul 3, 2020

Making Pixel Art UI in Aseprite

The resurgence of pixel art in the modern games industry has sparked an explosion of interest in the art form. While there are certainly a plethora of reasons for that, I’ve chosen to work with pixel art because it seems the perfect compromise between precision, simplicity and, of course, accessibility. I’m working on a lengthier post about the relative merits of pixel and other art forms for game development, but for now I just wanted to elaborate about the task of creating a rich and clear GUI (graphical user interface) with pixel art.

Jun 26, 2020

BenQ ScreenBar Plus E-Reading Lamp Product Review

Disclaimer: I received this product for free, but the opinions expressed in this review are genuine and my experience after using it. Product Links BenQ Website | AmazonUS Link After my experience using cheap desklamps, switching to the BenQ Screenbar Plus felt like it made a staggering change in how I work and in my overall desk setup. I’m absolutely a fan of a minimalist workspace, just a computer, keyboard, mouse, pens, a nice notebook, and a light to illuminate it all.

Jun 26, 2020

Elements of Motion Graphics | Part 2: Design and Composition

Composition and design are very complex topics that can have an immense impact on your art. They can change a boring looking render into a highly dynamic and interesting one. However, it’s not exactly a science, and rather difficult to quantitatively analyze, but I’ll try my best during this tutorial. I’ll assume you completed part 1, where we develop a toolbox of atoms, isotopes, and molecules - simple geometric components to generate interesting scenes.

Jun 19, 2020

Starting Game Dev Resources and Making a Card System - D36 Devlog Zero

Welcome to this development log where I discuss the game I’m working on and take a behind the scenes look at planning and design. Here are the resources I referenced in the video: 1. Writing a GDD 2. Previous blog post about GDD’s 3. Airtable for Advanced Spreadsheets 4. LucidChart for Mind Mapping 5. Brackeys Scriptable Object Unity Tutorial 6. Board Generation for a Grid Based Roguelite Please comment below if you have any ideas about what you want me to make next/want to see more about a specific gameplay system.

Jun 10, 2020

Elements of Motion Graphics | Part 1: Atomic Toolbox

Despite the apparent simplicity of minimalist motion graphics, there’s an immense amount of complexity in creating their composition and animation. This is my motivation for creating a small series about the Elements of Motion Graphics, a tutorial series dedicated to Blender Motion Graphics. In this series, we’ll be narrowing our focus to the essentials of artistic composition and the rules of animation. Starting from the simplest geometric shapes, or atoms, we’ll be generating up a few isotopes - small variations on elemental atoms - and many molecules, composed of clever compositions of atoms and their isotopes.

Jun 5, 2020

22 Byte-Sized Pixel Art Tips

So I’ve been trying to improve my pixel art skills recently, and I took up a challenge to do a pixel art every day. I’ve compiled 22 tips, some obvious, and some not, about how to make better pixel art. Video The Work Here are the best results from what I’ve worked on this past month: You can find all these on twitter, along with some other stuff: @digimut3

May 27, 2020

Using Blender Physics to Build a Trebuchet

I’ve always found Blender’s physics to be a bit unreliable, but it certainly has enormous potential, as it has a ridiculous amount of features made to simulate pretty much any mechanical device you can imagine. I’ve never really made a tutorial on Blender’s physics (except one about animated cyberpunk-esque waves), so let’s build a trebuchet today. Why a trebuchet? Because it’s clearly the superior siege engine. What else can toss a 90 kilogram projectile 300 metres?