This is where I post updates (usually monthly) on game development stuff I'm working on, including my job as a game programmer but especially personal projects.
-Joe Hocking
author of Unity in Action
I just submitted my entry in this year’s dungeon crawler jam: Uliel’s Quest. And you may notice that it’s not on my main account, but rather a new account I started for my new brand:
Basically, earlier this year I noticed DCJam that runs in late March. Well I’ve t…
As another part of my Godot explorations, I’ve learned how to generate meshes. My goal was essentially to port over my dungeon generation code from Unity, what I explained in detail in this tutorial I wrote years ago. Now I’ll explain how to do the same thing in Godot!
I didn…
As a somewhat random learning exercise, I picked up the book Computer Graphics from Scratch to see if it was any good. The title by itself is rather vague, but the subtitle “A Programmer’s Introduction to 3D Rendering” makes it clear this is up my alley. This tweet is from a few d…
As implied by my post last month, I’ve been testing out Godot as another development option. I’ve been finding pros that were both unexpected (at least to me) while the cons are being addressed. On the other hand, after they partially walked back their unwelcome new fees, I think I̵…
This is an explanation for how to make a decoupled messaging system using the built-in “signals” mechanism. I just started learning GDScript to do programming in Godot, and it isn’t taking me long at all. I quickly realized “signals” are a nice way of handling events, …
I almost forgot to post this month, which seems like a sign that this blog is running out of steam after all these years. I won’t be shocked if I start forgetting a month here or there.
Anyway, just this morning I noticed a Halloween asset pack from Kenney, which reminded me of my very fir…
The last couple weeks have seen a lot of brouhaha around Unity’s proposed runtime fee. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then read this, but long story short the changes left a bad taste in mouths across the game industry, including mine. This is making me investigate new o…
I recently read the book Seveneves, so here I am talking about it! Long story short, it’s a good sci-fi book that I recommend. Specifically, it’s a hard science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Be warned that it is a very looong book; given both its length and that the narrative has a …
I’ve been doing a lot of under-the-hood code work for implementing character stats and rules and such. However the main visible thing I did recently was this popup window when the player starts a game:
This is just programmer art right now, but shows the functionality. Type in a nam…
Last month I finally had all the character portraits made, so I started implementing the character generation system. You can see all the various character portraits in the game’s UI:
(You can see I varied the shirt and background colors slightly, just to give…
I decided to tweak the look of the portraits I added last month. I kept the same slate of portraits, but now they have a circular colored background, plus I’m probably going to vary the color of the shirts. Here are the easily recolored SVG files (ie. vector images) for the portraits:
…
I’m not planning to have a super in-depth character creator for this simple RPG, but I do plan to have some basic options. Here’s a collage of the portraits players can select:
I generated both male and female options in three different skin tones. Those will replace the eyep…
I’ve turned my attention to the UI for my cartoony RPG. Although I’m still not done working on the dungeon texturing, I realized I’ve been wasting too much time on those experiments. Rather than becoming mired on one thing, it’s much more productive to just move on with the …
As mentioned last month, I rebuilt a couple old projects in WebGL. One of these old projects was actually my first creation in Unity!
This was the project I made when I was initially learning Unity. Incidentally (considering this project was already relatively complex for a newcomer) this…
There are a couple old projects I recently realized aren’t visible anymore (because they were using old player technologies) so I decided to dust them off and do WebGL builds of them. I’ll talk about the other next month, but in this blog post I just want to focus on one, the demo of an…
I should go into the archives to see if this is true, but I’m pretty sure this blog has had one post a month since its inception. I have nothing much to talk about this month, but by Reorx’s beard I am not breaking the streak now!
As one bit of semi-noteworthy news, I’m attendi…
I have two bits of news relating to my work with augmented reality: I’m giving a talk about AR in Unity, and I’m gearing up to port Demolo to AR headsets.
The talk is just a presentation to this Unity user group. I’ve spoken to that group before, so the organizer invited m…
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the textures for my dungeon crawler. This is a screen recording showing one of the possibilities I’m exploring:
Basically, these textures are pixel art scaled up using this open-source tool.
I actually desaturated the textures too …
I built the arcade cabinet I mentioned last month, so in this post I’m going to both show pictures and talk a bit about how it went. Here it is!
(I realize the screen is upside-down, I did that on purpose to cover a mounting mistake. The games aren’t displayed upside-down, just t…
A classic rendering problem in realtime 3D graphics is overlapping transparent surfaces. Well, I recently wrote a shader for Unity that renders alpha transparency with correct depth sorting. My solution isn’t unique, but I don’t see a lot of people talking about it (I certainly didnR…
I finally started on the 3rd edition of Unity in Action at the end of last year, so between that and work I don’t really have much bandwidth lately for any other projects. I haven’t abandoned Eschatown, but I’m probably not going to do any work on that game until spring. At that p…
Short update post because Merry Christmas! Lots of work on various side projects of mine, but the only thing of note for Eschatown is that I discovered Character Creator 2D. I purchased that tool and hopefully I can rapidly create a bunch of character sprites that way, as opposed to the vector dude…
We’ve just uploaded a prototype for you to download and try. Just in time for Thanksgiving!
Just go to the game’s page for both Windows and Mac builds of Eschatown: https://midhavengames.itch.io/eschatown
This version is still very early and rough, and very few sprites are in the …
The graphics in this RPG project have definitely leveled up this month, so I have screenshots to show off. Also, while the game itself is still unnamed, we came up with a studio name: Midhaven Games! I went and registered an account on itch.io
If you recall how the map used to look, ther…
I’m starting to flesh out the graphical interface for my as-yet unnamed RPG. At this point I’ve implemented pretty much all the systems for the game, so tying everything together with a cohesive and attractive interface is my next main challenge.
For example, this animation shows off…
This past month I was simply cranking away on the simplistic but narrative-heavy RPG I’m currently engrossed in. Maybe I should talk to Michael about giving the game a name…
The most interesting new addition I’ve made is the turn-based combat system:
It’s fairl…
I’m now over a month into the basic RPG I mentioned in the last post, so a bunch of systems are in place. In my last post I talked a lot about the narrative system Ink, but this time I want to get back to what is a frequent topic on my devlog: procedural generation of maps. Here is what I cam…
Alright, I’m finally building something along the lines of the basic RPG / lightweight management sim I’ve mentioned before! I partnered up with indie author Michael Coorlim for this project. We actually started discussing a partnership back in February, but stuff happened. And by ̶…
Last month I mentioned a shading trick I was going to try on my old Phantom Organ Player model, and in this post I explain how that worked out. In addition, there are two obscure but cool tips I’ve learned in Unity, one of which may prompt me to return to a past game idea.
Long story …
