Enabling a user of your own software to write his own modules is not always an easy task. Enabling a user of your own software to write components for objects in such software is … well, even harder one. Most of the famous modern generic game engines like Unity do allow that - it is one of their mo…

It's been quite some time since I've actually participated on any game jam, hell… even released something outside of work (although - the border between work, hobby and fun - really blends in these past years). One of the things I realized in the past years is, that participating in anything like L…

I wish everyone, who celebrates Christmas to have Merry Christmas! And everyone else, to have few nice days off in this, let's say a different year.

After quite a bit of time, where I was unavailable to do anything game development related (sorry, too much things going on at this point), I finally found one weekend to get back to my project. I had a bit of struggle with animations (my pipeline was Blender -> Assimp -> Engine) - and it too…

With the announcement of new GameDev.net challenge I decided to join yet again!

I saved the first weekend pretty much only for brain storming and coming up with solid idea and sort of road map how to get there. Deciding which technology I'm going to use this time and how should I approach the develo…

The year, 2019, was somewhat good and bad for me here on GameDev.net … while I have managed to write some posts, and be especially active during the summer months, I was somewhat too busy in the work nearing the end of the year, that none of the actual plans were finished. I currently have one proj…

For past 2 months there was a challenge running here on GameDev.net - this time I finally decided to participate.

I, as many others, remember DOOM as one of the first (if not first) 3D games that we have played. GROOM is inspired by DOOM, built upon custom in-house ray traci…

And here it is, the gameplay, rendering and many other features are pretty much almost ready. I believe that at this point the game actually satisfies everything the challenge requests. Including, somewhat dark but still complete main menu:

Fig. 01 - Main menu with fonts and some effects…

Currently, the only "playable" level is still full of placeholders - I'm still hoping for having the game finished on 18th, but we will see. In worst case - there might be some place holders left (while the game would still be playable).

In the meanwhile I have added:

• Full physics (base…

Yet another Ludum Dare event was around, and I found time to participate this time again (this time it is actually 10th Ludum Dare I've participated in so far). So, first of all - if you are interested, just roll down the post and play the game.

Short gameplay video:

A small update I was tackling today - and that is skeletal animation. Now, doing anything animated with ray tracers is quite a pain...

• Static scenes - you simply build acceleration structure once ... and then you can move camera around, and everything tends to be nice and easy
• Scenes …

One of the major challenges in real time ray tracing are dynamic scenes. It is not hard to pre-compute BVHs and then just render the scene, but working with dynamic objects and geometry is challenging. To handle such scenario I've implemented multi-level BVHs where top-level BVH is rebuilt every…

I have been deciding to participate in Challenges for quite long time, mainly because I personally wanted to. And when DOOM was voted in, I decided I had to participate.

Of course I have to start somewhere (I made a road map, which is something I'm trying to hold to - and throughout the chal…

Implementing terrain tools is somewhat time consuming (in addition with me being quite busy in past 2 months - on topics I can't write too much about). Anyways terrain system and authoring tools in my engine start to look good, here is a small sneak peek:

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This time around I've decided to try something different (and thanks @isu diss for suggestion), which is - volumetric light scattering. To make this a bit more challenging for me, I've decided to implement this completely in Unity, all the code snippets will be mostl…

I'd like to make this a bit more regular hobby, releasing updates on my own game engine (among other projects), yet sometimes my real work steps in and I tend to be quite busy. Anyways back to the important part and that is what is this article about.

Making a game engine with WYSIWYG editor…

Welcome to the first part of multiple effect articles about soft shadows. In recent days I've been working on area light support in my own game engine, which is critical for one of the game concepts I'd like to eventually do (if time will allow me to do so). For each area light it is crucial to …

Sooner or later I wanted to do at least a bit of posting about version control systems which I've worked with and which one of those I find the best for me. In past years I've worked with various version control systems, with various interfaces.

I personally have few years of experience with…

For one of the upcoming projects (which will follow in some of the following posts), and as it had to fit the lore of the game, a black hole was necessary. Before going forward - let me add an image of what result I want to achieve:

Artist conception of black hole - NASA/JPL-Caltech

…

As I have quite a bit more to share, I've decided to divide this post in 2 parts. The first one will do a brief explanation on physical lights, while the second will focus on plausible shadows (which are my first step towards area lighting).

Are a nice to have feature. In…

So I've decided to be a bit more productive on writing side here on GameDev, and change form of my contributions here to something more consistent and possibly less boring. Why am I doing that? In short, to keep my motivation ... In long, unless I properly motivate myself and write down a task w…

It wouldn't be me if I wasn't participating actively in Ludum Dare. This time around I went for first person shooter, with sort of mysteries/physics attached to it. Before going further in the article - if you wish you can play it. Take a look here - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/logica…

I was actually trying to avoid this topic as long as possible, but with my current updates on lighting system - I had to bump into it, and of course write about it.

So, when designing my lighting system I kept in mind few things I want to achieve with it - multiple light sources, that is a m…

Since Ludum Dare 35 I'm regularly participating in every one of them and this one wasn't exception. My release thoughts are positive - this time I've again worked with one friend (with whom we've worked also in the past on Ludum Dare), and I enjoyed it a lot. As this is not a post mortem yet, I …

Having a pause from handling files and editor is good, to at least update something in rendering and keep motivation high. So I went ahead and implemented voxel cone tracing global illumination (and reflections of course).

Anyways, image time:

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Making editors is a pain. I have a list of thousands of items I'd rather do than this - yet I made myself a promise to drag at least one full featured editor tool over the finish line. There are few reasons for that:

So, I'm slowly progressing with my hobby project. This is the first time I write something about the project directly tied to it, or more likely essential part of it. I'll share few details here about the editor development.

Yet another Ludum Dare has come around, and this time I've participated without a real team on development side (I had some help from my sister in audio art, ideas, gameplay balancing and user interface). Before publishing full post mortem I'd like to provide a link:

https://ldjam.com/events…

Few weeks ago, I again participated in Ludum Dare and yet again in a team. There were actually three of us and we created the game in 72 hours for 'Compo' category. Some time passed and it is finally time to write a post-mortem.

Before going further, I'd like to point everyone out to the game and a …

If only making games was as easy as making custom PCBs

This Ludum Dare was a really interesting experience for both of us. We wanted to do LD36 already together, but one of us couldn't, so we had to wait for a LD37.