#tbt to some #gamedev prototyping. Gravity, folding, and pushing/dragging blocks.

I lament how paper flipping never captured properly in GIFs because it happened too fast. I'll make a slow version to show it off because this new lighting looks so good and it looks even better in motion. #gamedev #gameart

Love a good beard, but sometimes different normals across adjacent meshes give you an unwanted one. Here's how to fix it with @blender.org and the DataTransfer modifier. Add the modifier to one of the meshes and have it target the mesh with the normals you want to copy. Fixed! #gamedev #gameart

Yeah, it looked a bit like this. #gamedev #indiedev #gameart #techart

In #Unity3D, you need to worry about dependencies. If a scene references an asset, it will get loaded into memory (EVEN IF HIDDEN). We broke our game into hundreds of environment-only scenes that can be dynamically loaded, and then made tools so we could work without creating dependencies. #gamedev

Real-time shadows go a long way to help characters feel connected to the environment. Sadly, you can't always afford them (computationally). Blob or projector shadows are a good solution, and having multiple levels of projector shadows (for body, feet, etc.) are even better. #gamedev #gameart

Was digging through some old assets and found this from a one-pager for A Fold Apart. Thought it was cute and worth posting. So much work went into the characters and the shape language of the game. It seems simple and obvious because it took a lot of work to get it that way. #gamedev #gameart

Playing through to look for problems and found a couple. Can you spot the artifacting because one shader doesn't have double-sided global illumination? #gamedev #gameart #afoldapart (yes, I did add that hashtag just because it rhymed 😌)

When you crank the indirect multiplier on purpose #gamedev #gameart

When you accidentally crank the indirect multiplier #gamedev #gameart

#tbt to this weird bug that looked like a horror poster. #gamedev #indiedev #gameart

Sometimes, I love the looks when a bunch of scenes get loaded together and the lighting explodes. #unity3d #gamedev #indiedev

Happy New Year 😘

It's important to know where to stop. How much will people really look at the background water? They'll probably be reading the text messages. Doesn't that dialogue look compelling!? #gamedev #indiedev #gameart

Does fixing mistakes feel better than not making them? #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

Making a water shader that looks like crumpled paper. Funny when you accidentally invert the colours. #unity3d #gamedev

A Fold Apart used emissive glow so the player stood out in puzzles on small screens. They popped too much on big ones though. I wanted to try fresnel edge glow, but it made the character look like a cutout. But then adding a smoothstep to the world normal y made them pop AND blend #unity3d #gamedev

Some beautiful stuff in here! #indiegame

A composer sent me their portfolio and they used AI images as the visuals for their tracks on YouTube. My gut reaction was that the music was AI too. I suppressed that reaction, did some digging, and figured the music was legit, BUT that first impression put a stink on the whole thing.

The time and resource crunch meant A Fold Apart, though very pretty, was left with some rough edges. We took some time to port it to #unity3d 6 and I've been looking at what it would take to bring back some of the rendering techniques we had to set aside for performance. #gamedev #devlog #indiedev

At the start, A Fold Apart was thought to be too complex to work on mobile hardware, but a series of coincidences set the groundwork to make it possible. A thread. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

A Fold Apart had a tricky dev cycle. It was first intended to be a PC/Console game. This was mostly because I thought the amount of runtime math required to fold the paper, and the magical paper effects relying on GPU fill-rate, would make it impossible on mobile hardware. But then...

We are not hiring, but I was responding to cold-call apps. today and it occurred to me that I need to be taking precautions against AI in that process. This skepticism is going to hurt juniors a lot! 2D artists might need to put extra work into their portfolios to prove they're real, and that sucks.

Absolute monsters 😱

I probably should have paired this with an enticing photo... really get 'em going. #indiedev #gamedev

If any #gamedev (pro or student) were curious about anything let me know and maybe I can do a post about it. I can try to answer just about anything that isn't covered by a partner NDA.

We're skinning our profile to A Fold Apart because now that I (mostly Steven posting these days) have some distance from it, I want to go back and explore it: the technology, the art, the design, and launching it on 7 platforms, in 15 languages, in #Unity3d. Follow along for #gamedev #indiedev

And for ~$2, this Halloween treat is hard to beat!

Halloween has officially begun (at least in our timezone) and there is no better time for a spooky, point-and-click adventure, that you can finish all the endings in one sitting. Finish a Halloween game on Halloween! store.steampowered.com/app/1776080/...

The new Steam Deck Verified page for A Fold Apart is super cute, and it's on sale! If you want creative puzzles (with a built-in hint system), relaxing music, a touching story, and a customizable couple, check it out! store.steampowered.com/verified/451...

Our friends have a new game!

@ozone.birb.house Hello! We are a Game Studio!

Blue sky can be a bit intimidating since we tend to be at our most creative when working within constraints. ;P