Monke. Rat. Wishlist.

There is something quite scary about finding your passion and turning into your career. It becomes your entire life. The truth is that I can’t imagine NOT doing this. I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t creating. It’s terrifying to think that there may be a moment in the future where I can’t do it.

Designers - what something that seems trivial, but has massive repercussions? I’ll go first - adding in climbing to your game. As soon as you add in the ability to climb onto things - it’s completely changes how the AI systems work - and how your levels are designed. There’s a reason why so many slow paced horror games don’t let you climb on objects…. Cos damn the ripple effect it has is insane!

Apparently I stopped playing games in 1999. Duke Nukem wasn’t so much the game - But the BUILD engine. Same with Quake - it wasn’t the game I loved - it was the editors! All the others? They just got that good gravy.

Phone your parents. Talk to your dad about the first time you watched an action movie together.. or that time you bunked church together to grab a McDonald’s breakfast and browse the computer stores for games. Talk to your mom about your birthday parties when you were a kid. Your favorite cake. The meals she made. The music she played. The songs she sang. Things change so slowly - then so fast. The whiplash of growing up - of seeing your parents grow into older versions of themselves - is so jarring. If you have a good relationship with your folks - with your family - cherish it. Nurture it.

Same actor BTW.

Konami focusing on small standalone stories in the Silent Hill series is just so fantastic. Smaller weirder projects that are loosely connected by visual touchstones rather than mechanics or narrative has really opened up the entire world for Silent Hill games. They are letting small, tight knit teams play in their backyard - giving them the resources to explore. Honestly with Bloober Teams remake coming, and Silent Hill F and Silent Hill Townfall - it’s quickly becoming one of my ‘the games to look out for’ Franchises. Can’t wait to see what’s cooking next!

You can really feel the influence that @jon_ScreenBurn 's time at @CAGames had on Silent Hill Townfall. Really interesting to see the influence of Alien Isolations smaller tight DLC design has in a Silent Hill setting. Maybe I'm reading into it - but I can feel that sort of 'distilled pure loop DLC' design in Townfall!

And more prop work! Because the player is so low to the ground - I've realised that I need to concentrate details in much more focused ways than other assets I've made. When you are smaller - sneaking - hugging the corners and spaces you are in, you tend to get VERY close to the geometry. Lots of work in Trimsheets, high res texture atlases, and using tiling textures to ensure the detail holds up.

Prop work!

Gonna take some time to put together my stray custom scripts and Blender Addons into a useable toolkit. I’ve got lots of tools for working with Trim sheets, automated decal placement, adding in wires and pipes, etc.

A test I did when first learning unreal. An oldie - but not sure if I ever posted it.

Has anyone made a third person game that switches to a ‘Mortal Kombat’ style fighter for its combat? It seems like the perfect marriage of genre smash, and could be done very organically.

The sad part about Wolverine having those trails and obvious quest markers is that players zoom through the beautiful environments SO quickly. A 30 second stretch of one of those levels probably took a month to build… and players just walk past. Maybe my brain is too ‘indie dev budget conscious’ - but damn - the amount of work that’s bypassed by forcing a speed run is crazy.

A folding phone just sounds like the worst parts of a phone and a tablet. Thicker phone with worse battery… smaller tablet with a line…and worse battery. Honestly the iPhone peaked at the 12 Mini. Perfect size. Good battery. Excellent camera.

Coming along...

Of all the tools and utilities I've made - this is the one I use the most. It was also the first one I built. Unreals LightMap UV packer doesnt work if your object doesn't have UV's to start with. I kitbash a LOT - so sometimes the pieces I use don't have UV's. Instead of having to unwrap them externally - this uses XAtlas, which is built into Unreal, to pack my UV's for lightmaps. It sets them to the correct channel, strips out any unneeded UV's, sets the ideal bleed - and sets the actual lightmap resolution all with one click... and can batch as many objects as you want. And for mechanical models - XAtlas is a beast! github.com/jpcy/xatlas

Us… deep discussions about how to depict the experiments in our games… lots of tests to ensure we are being sensitive to the subject matter… endless art prototypes… reading… talking… questioning if this is even a space we should be exploring… Frictional: (I love it!)

Every shot here is almost 100% cg.

Question to tech artists - with the low vertex limit on VATS - do you just.... work within it? Or is there a trick to getting VATS work with higher res meshes? I see lots of early crowd sim work that (Im assuming) uses VATS - but those models all look WAY higher res than 4096 - AND scale with LOD's. Do you break up the model into smaller parts, and sync the anims? And generate a separate VATS texture per part per LOD? I understand the underlying tech - but I feel like Im missing a trick here...

I think the DLSS 5 tech is super impressive - but at the half FPS hit, I think that most games could pretty easily achieve what its doing by just doubling their MS budget. If your shaders could be twice as complex, textures double the size, have twice the amount of SSAO/HBAO you could pretty easily hit those visuals.