Day job stuff 📝💻⚠️👓 Game dev stuff 👾🗺️🧭🫂👻

Shout out to The Legend of Zelda after 40 years! A game whose sense of exploration and adventure still feels unparalleled to me in many ways. Art scans courtesy of @historyofhyrule.com: www.flickr.com/photos/histo... Hand-drawn map by my dad, from when we played the game together in the 80s.

I'm late to everything as per, but have today discovered @retroachievements.org is a thing??? Going through Rayman atm, no cheats, no savestates, just ~30 years of experience playing it, so I can have bragging rights lmao

some people are very cruel and i don’t understand them. the world could be so much more beautiful

Obsessed w/ the ch*tgpt subreddit, ppl are spiraling bc there's a new version that's SO rude+ confrontational + as much as I DETEST the rotten disgusting industry, I find joy in dysregulated ppl who thought a lovely robot was their best friend suddenly being called stupid + being gaslit by the robot

Bon retour parmi nous, Monsieur Rayman! ✨✌️ This one is a personal tribute to the 30th anniversary of the Rayman game, as well as to its original composer, Rémi Gazel, who passed away in 2019 after battling cancer. #watercolors #watercolours #rayman30thanniversaryedition #rayman

Couple more manual pages, unfinished, messy writing, but just trying to get out as much worldbuilding-ish stuff as I can. The districts are taking shape!! (My fav are either the obsolete partying robots or the ineffectual politicians that control the weather) #gamedev #indiedev #worldbuilding

more manual pages. this started as a fun little side-project to see if I could make something era appropriate, but surprisingly has helped nail down some design decisions eg. District themes/item names/names of other stuff, as well as refine the lore of the world #gamedev #indiedev

Procrastinating by making fake manual pages. Getting really into the idea of spreading encoded text around the environments to provide extra worldbuilding, secrets + whatnot. I love the thought of someone actually sitting with pen and paper trying to piece it together #gamedev #indiedev #gamemanual

In lighter news, I made a silly font for worldbuilding purposes, signposts/environmental text etc. might be fun to hide messages with it, if people can work out which symbol corresponds to which letter #gamedev #indiedev

more animation! i used to make little stop motion animations when I was like 9 using a terrible webcam + some clay + remember my dad bought me a book on like techniques of animation. all these years later I'm getting to apply them lil running fellow! #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

Climbing animation! playing w/ my DIY vertex weighting system for animation, easy to grab + stretch parts of model, no complex heirarchy of bones, each limb can have a min/max range of motion defined by me look at him go :D #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev #unity3d

Look at this little fellow go

i hate using bones. fiddly, complex heirarchy, bugs w/ positions sticking used vertex colour to create a weight system + use RGB channels as alpha in lerps to transform positions of verts w/ the shader can set min/max positions for each part + move w/ friendly sliders #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

intentionally breaking the VRAM for a laugh merry christmas eve! #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

experimenting w/ mind boggling effects taking a portion of the tex atlas from VRAM + scrolling within its own tile, or tiling only that portion not the whole thing, was a ball ache its silly + complicated + there are far easier ways to do this stuff but I'm having FUN #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

here is the fake PS1 VRAM that I put together to create the menu inside one shader (with a script to change values based on input) there are far easier ways to go about this, but it's been SO much fun recreating stuff like this but with the added benefit of modern tools #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

final post about menus, I SWEAR pretty much finished (apart from "options" menu) idk if anyone is interested in a deeper dive on how it's put together in one shader? ps: i will always maintain that subtractive fading out/in looks better than a smooth even lerp. #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d #UI

finally added something v special, I was putting it off for ages, bc it was hard but.... framebuffer feedback fx! One of the best fx on the PS1 used in battle transitions, entering levels in Crash 3, fake motion blur in MGS etc. it's not perfect yet but I LIKE IT #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d #ps1

another menu update !! now done entirely inside 1 shader. a script reads controller input and sends values. all sub menus, cursors, FX, and dynamic BG are actually a complex bunch of UV manipulations on ONE texture atlas, all blended together in different ways! #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

As we headed into a 2nd wave of Covid in 2020, drawing York Minster seemed to offer a way of keeping steady, a little less worried. I added some pigeons (doves?) to show a bit of life. #ArchitecturalIllustration #Pencil #drawing #ArtShare

closer look at my new textures (besides the grass and water which I still liked) still fitting into the texture atlas, but no longer using uniform squares trying a holistic approach, diff sizes based on how detailed texs are, how close they will get to the cam, etc #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

still working on this, making the textures a bit more interesting, quick comparison + some piano I recorded this morning (1/2) #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d #ps1

more shader stuff 1 flat plane (4 verts, 2 tris), parallax map offsets stone tex to appear deep below the surface tex. distortion on the surface is also applied to the stone, offset by the PM to the same depth then blending in various ways to put it all together :D #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

I can grow fake grass now!!! all done with @amplifycreations.bsky.social ❤️ slightly longer video BUT it's got captions and pictures to explain stuff, and I think it's p cool (i swear I'll stop banging on about POM soon but it's been SO much fun to play with) #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d #shaders

PARALLAX obsessed by this. so many possibilities even without the complex fiddly fake 3d w/ occlusion mapping, just a simple flat plane w/ textures. BGs are from Rayman 1! music is a lil sketch I was messing around with this afternoon! #gamedev #indiegamedev #unity3d #PARALLAX

when I was little me and my best friend would be at school on lunch in the playground and he would say "let's play Silent Hill". i'd be james sunderland and he'd be everyone else. mostly involved "you open the door and it's.......MARIA" or "it's......PYRAMID HEAD" and we'd run around screaming.

more rendering fun.......FOG

despite how long it takes my laptop to render these, only for me to immediately crunch it down to 320x240 and lower the colour bit depth, i'm massively enjoying making them!! thursday render

another render

weird renders

Took a few months off and was overwhelmed loading up unity and figuring out how tf everything i'd set up works so instead I got sidetracked experimenting w/ my other fav PS1 aesthetic...fixed cam + PRE RENDERED BGs 🖼 + some spooky music I threw together in 5 mins #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d #PS1

I had to take some time away for my mental health It’s not been the best But I’m alive! Hello! Is anyone still there?

Beyond Good & Evil (2003) Hillys City. Developed by Ubisoft Pictures.

friend.jpg #gamedev #indiedev

lil evening sketch :)

Please play Elemental Gimmick Gear 😊

just a little update on the district of machines still VERY rough - I'm not gonna post every time I make slight changes but I thought the factory sounds were cool video is me messing around in clipchamp. i'm 100 years old and don't know how to edit videos #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev #music

Here, have some of my favorite screenshots

512*240 resolution! some games (Spyro+Crash) used this unusual mode + scaled back to correct aspect ratio. gives higher fidelity than 320*240, a slight but noticeable difference! I wanted to try this purely for the beautiful effect it has on the dither #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev #unity3d

Indie game dev is like building a house, except you have to do the architecture, the lawyering and paperwork, the actual building, the interior design, and pave the road to get there. Except instead of a house to live in at the end, you get like, 37 dollars in purchases.

held off on SFX for so long, but the difference = huge bouncy mushroom is my fav 🍄 (ground ray checks coordinates of a secondary UVmap (each face assigned to a portion of a 4*4 grid, 16 total surfaces) + assigns walking sound! jumping sounds are me! 🎤 #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev #unity3d

thought it was time I showed a real level, not a weird testing environment.. been remodeling this one based on an earlier version from 2019, here's what I have so far - just so you get a vibe of the place the entrance to THE DISTRICT OF GARDENS 🌳 #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev #blender #unity3d

I'm either testing fun new ideas, or having a breakdown due to said rewrite. . . as always, the Gardeners will explain what's new 👩‍🌾 (feat. the new movement system. looks exactly the same (sort of the point) BUT ITS BETTER I SWEAR I WROTE IT FROM SCRATCH) #gamedev #indiegamedev #unity3d #indiedev

Not much update lately- 2 weeks completely rewriting character controller script, custom transform movement, no character controller/rigidbody or off the shelf collision detection..nowt. was so fed up with unitys built in stuff, I made my own. It was HARD #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d #indiegamedev

Being v organised + writing out a game bible so when life inevitably gets in the way + I don’t have as much time to devote to the project, I don’t completely forget everything about the process and my spaghetti code, which has happened like four times before now 📚 #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev

BIG update to the sliding system. ⛷️ it's a little rough around the edges, but it already feels better than trying to manually wrestle the camera around corners, or having it try to always be behind the player without constraint. wheeeeeeeeeee #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiedev #unity3d #surfsup

Love always will be love! #pride