And now, a very personal message to commemorate the Tenth Anniversary of Dust: An Elysian Tail!

I spent a few weeks tidying up leg and head-tracking IK, and smoothing out character animation transitions. Everything is feeling nice and smooth now. Now to stop procrastinating on actual assets.

It's neat to fix a bug in your own game, giving you an understanding on why you've seen something similar in other titles. For example there was a .01% chance my NPCs were spawning without eyeballs. Eerie, though kinda rad.

Optimal model retopology. Whenever I resolve a series of polygons and they don't cleanly resolve into a quad I feel like the authorities are just moments away from rappelling through the windows.

Akumajō Dracula (Castlevania) released 40 years ago. No other series inspired me as much as a game developer (Dust:AET originally started as a pixel-art Simon's Quest style game, whip and all). I'm glad that Konami has started giving this series some love once again.

Ugh, walk cycles. You can tweak them to your hearts content but invariably you'll always experience them from that one angle and then it's back to adjusting keyframes and curves.

Despite Ys I&II being my favorite game I hadn't touched the Trails series until now. Trails in the Sky 1st chapter was the best game I've played in ages. I've played exclusively Falcolm and Vanillaware this year and it's the happiest I've been in a long, long time.

It's a ton of work to get a character working in game. Design, modeling/skinning/rigging, animation, code.... however when it's finally tracking the player (even if the head is rotated 90` and freaking out via gimbal lock) it suddenly feels alive. Feels worth it.

I think the Ocarina of Time remake is looking fantastic, and aesthetically captures what they were doing with the original (vs the hybrid toon stylization generally used after Windwaker). And of course I've always been a little partial to a swordsman and his flying companion.

I've spent so much time programming inverse-kinematic solutions that I can't stop staring at people's feet (in video games and real life). I promise I'm not crazy.

It's always fun to add a new enemy behavior to make encounters much more dynamic, but it's followed by the arduous task of integrating it into the existing bestiary. Tons more animation, logic, and gameplay design for seemingly simple adjustments.

I've got NPC's names being hidden until spoken to. Now to address whether I really want to write an introduction for each and every single one. That's probably a no.

Dust:AET is 14 years old. 3.5 years dev time, 3 additional years on support and ports, 2 for Sneakin', and 8 on my current project. A huge thank you to those following me after all this time! I'm really hoping to have something to share in the coming year.

I spent yesterday integrating Unity's GPU Resident Drawer only to find performance significantly dropped. I'm already limiting gameobject usage and drawing as much as I can on the GPU, which may have been a factor. I'm happy with my performance but every extra frame counts.