I ported Broken Age and the adventure remasters to the PS Vita and man look at how huge the SteamDeck is compared to the Vita. :o

Here is a close-up (and partial slow-down) of one of my favorite morphs in the game: the bridge in the Mountain Shrine. When I first got the rock to look like flowing water at the end I was elated. :)

steam machine de la abuela

Friendly advice for folks trying to join the industry. Make sure to mention in the cover letter what excites you about the posted role and avoid talking about why you really enjoy working in a different role. It creates confusion about why you are applying in the first place.

🚨 "The Making of Double Fine's Keeper" is now available! 🚨 Many of you have been asking for this one; we're happy to say the cameras continued to roll here at the studio during Keeper's development. Come see how this very special game came to be, from the team themselves! 😊 youtu.be/1OOfRTfMnx0

I’ve talked about how Keeper’s morphs use distance fields (DFs) as their surface representation. But if there are no polys, how do we render them? A DF gives the distance to the nearest surface at any point, which we can exploit for rendering by marching along the view ray until we hit the surface.

me when I start playing KEEPER, vs me after 4 minutes of playing KEEPER

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "Stochastic Tile-Based Lighting in HypeHype" by Jarkko Lempiäinen from HypeHype is now online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O44...

I wanted to clarify what I mean by fixed vs. dynamic topology. In game graphics meshes can normally be not merged smoothly because the edges and connectivity is static and holes can't be closed or created. Dynamic topology recomputes the connectivity when needed.

I wrote a bunch of compute shader code to hook into Lumen which evaluates mathematical light shapes. On the CPU side we are using perceptual filtering to pick the most important lights. It was a lot of fun! :) bsky.app/profile/leep...

I did a lot of lighting on Keeper and it was a joy to have a fully dynamic lighting system, which made shifts in areas like this easy to do. We also had custom Lumen-based lights that @p1xelcoder.bsky.social put together that helped us hit the painterly/stage lighting look we were after.

Normal polygonal meshes have a fixed topology. Roughly speaking this means the number of holes in an object can't change. Also the (explicit) surface of two meshes can't be blended smoothly into one. This is no problem for distance field morphs with implicit surfaces.

Bonus post to end the week: If you are a graphics programmer do yourself a favor and get a MIDI board. It makes the work way more tactile and fun. Full props to Matt and @aaronmjacobs.com for getting me on the MIDI train. :)

The morphs in Keeper use distance fields as an (implicit) surface representation, which makes it possible to control the distance at which the surface should lie. In other words, it’s easy to deflate or inflate objects, and meshes become easily ‘moldable’.

So what is a "distance-field"? It refers to a function that tells you, for every point in space, how far away the closest surface is and—by extension—in which direction it lies.

If you're still on the fence about KEEPER, a lot of folks have said some incredibly kind things about it. We are blushing! ☺️

Article about Creative Direction on @polygon.com that I contributed to, which also features one of my very early concepts from Keeper! www.polygon.com/game-directi...

The experiments with surflets and voxels yielded some cool results, but it became quite obvious that distance fields were the way to go to represent the surface of morph objects (as I alluded to previously). This allowed us to implement some visually neat effects like this twist transition.

I often see dope game art I wanna retweet, but don't want to spam the wide variety of followers I have here. So I made an alt for spreading the low poly love! @dalowpolyrat.bsky.social

Every cool graphics feature begins with a doodle… well at least for me.

I love our breakable floors.

This illustrates the full process of capturing the "Essence" of a mesh to be used in a morph. The distance field is retrieved and then the mesh is projected onto the cube-shaped "screen" in order to pack its surface properties into two cubemaps.

Is might cat obsessed with isosceles right triangles?

In order to use a mesh in a morph it has to be converted first, which is done by projecting its properties (base color, normal, roughness, AO) onto a cube. The results are then packed into two cubemaps. These maps in combination with the associated distance-field comprise the "Essence" of the mesh.

i had a chat with lukasz and @antovsky about gamedev and stuff, if youre into that sort of thing! the middle hour is the juiciest but its all fantastic, ofc ;) youtu.be/mFBmoCv5EcQ?...

If you're a fan of Max Ernst, Krull, and the Brothers Quay you should watch this!

I'll talk more about morphs next week, but here is a prototype called "fractal guts" which didn't make it into the game. It's perfect for Halloween though!

Our studio @wunderfax.com is making a game called STUMBLE IN THE DARK! :o Golly, we've been working on it for quite a while. I'm so happy that we're finally starting to show something about the game. Watch this space!

Ha! I totally forgot that we did one more morph experiment using space filling spheres (thanks OpenVDB!). I was planning to compute a correspondence set, so that the spheres of the different shapes can move from one to another, but we moved on to another approach. Still looks pretty cool though. :)

Between surflet and voxel morphs the former was more promising. Here is a look behind the cube-shaped curtain... Each object is represented by a cube-quad to obj-surface mapping, which then makes it straight forward to move the associated surflet between the surface locations and blend properties.

Another experiment we tried was to use (axis and surface aligned) voxels rather than surflets. The obvious benefit is that there are no holes the surface, but the voxelized look didn't fit Keeper and it was expensive to render due to the voxel density needed to make this work.

Surreal seeing Keeper in an actual printed copy of the New York Times.

In order to get to the morphs we have in Keeper now I first experimented with different approaches. Here is one of the early tests in which "surflets" are used to transform from one to another mesh. I still love the "wiggly paths" during the transition.

So a video dropped today of game composer Takuya Nakamura DJing a jungle set in the middle of a rice field while accompanying it on trumpet and I feel like more folks should know about this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVvr...

Another visual effect @leepetty.bsky.social, Jeremy Mitchell and I talked about a lot for Keeper was the Mandelbulb fractal. It didn't make it into the game in it's "pure" form, but the experiments I did were fun. :)

Today's challenge: Can you figure out what game this development screenshot comes from? We recovered this from our press CD collection (we know what it is, but we want to see if anyone can get this!)

In case you are wondering what is involved to make a game like Keeper… here is some (but by no means all) the hardware I used.

A short story told through passport photos…

I wrote a neat morph system for Keeper and hopefully I can share a bit more about it in the future. This particular morph was an experiment using symmetry that didn't make it into the game in the end.

Wow, NYT gave our game a 100 (!?) I don't even know what to say!

Adorable in premise, Keeper is a psychedelic exploration of life packed into a brief runtime that’s well worth experiencing at least once in your lifetime. Our review: bit.ly/43jI6Pb

Just remember next year, when EVERYBODY'S making walking lighthouse games, that we were first! (Keeper is out RIGHT NOW on Xbox & Windows & Steam!) youtu.be/CDmvkGUSWzI?...

Holy cow. It's release day! 😲

A Note about KEEPER Spoilers: On our end, we promise we won't be posting spoilers on main until way post-launch (and even then, we'll do our best to give you all some time to play through the game and let it marinate). How can you help maintain the mysteries of KEEPER? Glad you asked! ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Twig is super excited about tomorrow, much to squawk about! See you at 8am PT tomorrow (Oct 17) for the launch trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDmv...

Keeper - 2025 (uncolorized) @doublefine.com @xbox.com

Countdown to the KEEPER Launch Trailer is up on our YouTube channel if you want to get a tab ready (and there are some lovely in-game vistas you can enjoy while you wait)! The trailer and the game go live tomorrow morning (Oct 17) at 8am PT! youtu.be/CDmvkGUSWzI?...

Keeper — A totally normal game with no weird stuff! 👀 Friday, Oct 17 on @Xbox.com & @Steampowered.com

You know that the release is nigh once the NVIDIA driver update mentions your game... :o

Meowfeggio 528hz Healing Frequencies ✨️🌌