Tag: gamedev
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new tool: Impromptu Texture Browser
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This is a “texture browser” utility widget for UE5.5 that presents materials in the style you’d expect from a level editor in the 90s: as square thumbnails. Unreal normally presents materials in the content browser as lit and mapped to a sphere. This isn’t useful for much. When you’re making a level, you want to actually see the images you’re working with. So this plugin presents them that way. It looks like Hammer’s texture…
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Unreal Scoop: Data-Driven CVars
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If you use UE5, you might have noticed there’s a new-ish feature called Data-Driven Console Variables, and you might also have noticed that nothing comes up when you Google this. There’s not much to it, but in the interests of having something come up when you Google this, here’s what I’ve figured out about data-driven…
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Unreal Scoop: Making a “Compiling Shaders…” Screen
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Unreal has a reputation amoung the ill-informed for being plagued by shader compilation stutter. As an attribute of Unreal itself, this is basically made up – devs are just not always doing what they are supposed to do pre-ship to avoid this issue. I’ll elaborate, but basically, to avoid compiling shaders during gameplay, you want…
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a good level design tool finally came out
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I’ve been testing a friend’s WIP level design plugin for Unreal for a while now, and while it’s still very early, it’s available now on Patreon and you should support it there. It’s bringing Source 2 style geometry editing to Unreal, allowing level design to properly be a thing again, and I made a video…
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a little car game i am making
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I guess in April 2023 (holy shit that is longer ago than I thought) I started making a little car game prototype, sorta inspired by Micro Machines/MASHED/Re Volt etc, and I got back into it a bit recently. I guess so far I’ve probably worked on it for under two weeks cumulatively but it’s starting…
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“sleight of hand” is a video game i’ve been working on
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At the moment I’m a Senior Technical Designer at RiffRaff Games, working on a stealth game about a witch. We demoed some new stuff at Day of the Devs the other week. You should check it out, probably!
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what i reckon about yellow paint
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For years, more or less annually, the bit of the internet where gamers and game developers overlap has kicked off with aggro debate about “yellow paint”, a handholdy game trope where the player is constantly told what to do and where to go. I always feel a bit insane when this happens. A player thinks…
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InFlux/Redux comparison/dev thoughts video
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Just spent some time making a comparison/developer thoughts video of InFlux Redux (2024) vs the original InFlux (2013), which was fun. Here’s me opening the editors for both projects side-by-side and saying whatever it occurs to me to say about the development process(es). Get set for 50 whole minutes of unrehearsed dev thoughts
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ask: good level design tools when
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Small Victorian Child asked: dear mr wintergreen, when will my father (colloquially known as Good Level Design Tools) return from the war? yours trulysmall victorian child The answer may surprise you.
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weird west side project
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In some of my spare time, I’ve been having fun screwin’ around building something out of Weird West assets and concepts, which Wolfeye kindly don’t mind me doing and sharing. I worked on Weird West for years and always wanted to make something else out of their art, which looks amazing close-up. Here’s a video…
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Auto Material Instance Maker Tool for UE5
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Here’s a tool I made a while back that you can buy: it lets you automatically create instanced materials for many textures at once, given a base material with parameters to fill. This saves you a lot of time if you have a lot of textures you want to turn into material instances, like: 200…
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InFlux Redux is out today!
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That’s what I’d be saying if I remembered to make this post several days ago when it came out. It is out, though! You should buy it on Steam and leave a positive review. 11 years after the original and some amount of years after I started working on it, here’s a blog post about…
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animating while not an animator
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One of the things I’m not is an animator, but every few years I give it a crack, and recently I gave it a crack inside Unreal, which now has really good rigging and animating tools. I made a complete Max Payne dive – sideways, front and back, all blending together just like in the…
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Dev Scoops: XCOM/2’s art direction
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I had a moan about XCOM 1 being prettier than XCOM 2 the other day and got some nice replies from the Art Director of both, Greg Foertsch.
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my Deus Ex Lipsyncing Fix Mod: making of
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Back in 2021 I made a mod for Deus Ex 1 that fixes the lipsyncing and blinking, which, I betcha didn’t know, was broken since ship. Everything I wrote about it is on Twitter, and it oughta be somewhere else, so here’s a post about it. The mod itself can be downloaded here.
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Unreal Engine Plugins That I Reckon Are Good
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Here is an incomplete list of unreal engine plugins that I like Mesh Tool by Nate Mary is a general modeling tool and the best way to do level design in the editor, though UE5’s CubeGrid tool is really good too (but has fewer functions than this). You can use both together, both just output…
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the time i made headcrabs in unreal
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Way before Half-Life Alyx had been announced, I spent a couple of days one Christmas remaking Half-Life 2’s headcrabs (using their existing art and anims) in UE4, but with additional physical reactivity – they can lose their footing and struggle to recover, smash into things and active-ragdoll around after a bad jump, get picked up…
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edsplash.bmp: a collection
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in the unreal engine, edsplash.bmp is the name of the splash image presented to the user while the editor loads. projects without a custom edsplash.bmp are considered especially heinous. often a given edsplash will never be seen outside its development studio. but sometimes an edsplash escapes onto the internet. these are their stories
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game dev post: Weird West dissolvin’ walls
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One of many things I worked on on Weird West is the hiding of walls/floors/etc between player and camera. When I joined the project, roof-hiding and the-floors-above-you hiding were all that was in; the camera went top-down at about 80 degrees when you entered a building. I found that a bit disorienting and wanted to…
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blurred ball
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Finally trying the material based radial motion blur from ContentExamples (since regular motion blur is bad at things that spin). Works p well
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my Weird West first person mod is out
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When Weird West got its final patch, it introduced mod support, and includes the First Person Mod that WolfEye got me to finish up after I put out a vid of a much jankier version I pooped out a while back. Here’s a kind of low-energy making-of video that I threw together.
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laments on half-life 2’s ai and balance
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just watched back this video i did about soldier AI in half-life 2 years ago and i still agree with it! what a relief
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jedi game tech test
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I spent 8 hours on this Jedi Survivor tech test when I was interviewing for a Technical Narrative Designer job there a while back. Got offered the job, but didn’t take it. The test called for “a system to manage the narrative”, plus timed lifts that are easy for level designers to set up, a…
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here’s some pretty pictures from a game i had to cancel due to circumstances beyond my control
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map by Suzanne Will and I
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if you want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, graphics tech advancements should please you
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it’s massively massively feasibler than ever before for one-person devs/tiny studios to rapidly iteratively make stuff, all kinds of stuff, from the fancy-graphic’d to the deliberately lo-fi, than it ever has been before, with fewer limitations, because of the same tech advancements that are mostly marketed via boring shit like a realistic building exploding or…
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a funny thing happened when i told a lie on the internet
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i suggested that this photo i took near my house was a screenshot out of unreal engine 5, and many people believed me and were amazed, or didn’t but were unsure, or recognised it as a troll but thought it was a troll on people thinking it was a photo (which it was), or just…
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dev scoops: Max Payne Kung Fu Edition
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The most impressive video game mod of all time is for certain Max Payne: Kung Fu Edition, which, despite being by far the most accomplished Payne mod code-wise and having a ton of custom animations high quality enough to fit in with the rest of Max Payne, was developed by one guy, Kenneth Yeung.
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Dev Scoops: Simulating Eyes in Half-Life 2
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Years ago, I was making a stealth game in Unreal that I’ve since had to cancel amid circumstances beyond my control. At one point I was trying to make my characters’ eyes nice, and the gold standard for that was (and arguably still is) Half-Life 2. HL2 takes a novel approach: the eyes are not…
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thinkin bout how
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it seems like smaller-to-medium-sized game development often starts from recognising some feasibler-than-it-seems, high-bang-for-buck gimmick or tech thing, with which you can reliably wow people, and then imagining an otherwise small-scope game around that
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the worst part of deus ex: human revolution is actually the best part
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get around, you were just forced to fight and kill a guy? And everyone was mad? And later the devs patched in other options, basically one for every style of play you might be into? Well I’ve decided they were right the first time
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games should require specific input to pull the pin on a grenade,
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separate from throwing it. 90% of the potential interactivity of a grenade is collapsed when it explodes
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Sellin’ my Light Audit Tool
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Selling this on itch and fab. It’s a helper widget I made to help track down expensive lights in UE5. Sorts all the lights in your scene by how expensive they probably are (based on how many shadow casting objects are in the radius, etc). Also gives you an easy way to directly change properties…
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frustration
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feels like my gamedev superpower is “not getting frustrated easily by tasks”. when something goes wrong frustration is hardly ever what i feel. when it is, it’s pretty hard to push through and often i just don’t. but it’s rare i always see someone hitting a concrete wall that for me (even if stumped) would…
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ask: porting games to the switch
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@Xuelder asked: What is the biggest technical hurdle you see when porting games to the Switch?
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ask: should tim sweeney open-source UE1
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@ETPC asked: should tim sweeny open source unreal engine 1 and 2 absolutely. i gather the reason this doesn’t happen (at least for 1) is a valve-style “it would require a fair bit of work nobody ever feels like doing”. but it would fucking rule i feel like it’s not acknowledged enough that unreal engine…
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Ugh I Guess I Want To Move From Unity To Unreal Dot Com
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Decided to do something useful: whipped up a quick Internet Site for all the Unity folks who now want to learn Unreal and don’t know where (or whether) to start because it’s daunting as hell. http://www.ughiguessiwanttomovefromunitytounreal.com
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unreal engine general beginner tips for persons who are beginning with unreal engine
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Spent some time on a comment to help someone out who was having trouble starting out in Unreal, but it might as well be a post, so here it is: Unreal is really good, but it doesn’t teach itself well, which frustrates me a lot. Once you’re across it it’s wildly empowering, but getting across…
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porting Adios To The Nintendo Switch Entertainment System
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Couple years ago, I handled the port of Adios, the game about the pig farmer who doesn’t want to dispose of corpses for the mob anymore, to the Switch. It took a week. The Switch is weak as piss, so this is always a little bit of a pain, but the port ended up looking…
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Dev Scoops: Max Payne 2’s character shadows
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A while ago I tweeted about Max Payne 2’s character shadows, which were really nice for 2003. Luckily, a couple of Remedy folks who worked on the game saw it and provided scoops:
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ask: ideal games job
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@johnnemann asked: If you could wave a magic wand and have your ideal video game studio to work in, what would that look like? How big, what roles, and what would your job be?
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ask: level design tools
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@porglezomp asked: I remember I originally followed you on Twitter for level design tool review stuff. Do you have opinions on level design tools that should exist but don’t? I always want to hear about tools i have many such opinions but i’ve spent so much time expressing them over the years that i’ve somewhat…
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ask: the next big video game tech junk
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@mahalis asked: what do you see as the next big tech challenge that the engine people should try to solve, post-Nanite and Lumen? (I realize neither of those is “done” so we’re not exactly post- them, but you probably get what I mean)
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game dev post: Weird West and the Case of the Cursed Strawberry. cw: unsatisfying conclusion
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So in this game Weird West, you can cut foliage. Like if you’ve got a machete or something you can cut away grass or bushes or whatever, and some of them drop stuff. I did a post about some of that stuff. A little while after ship, I got a bug assigned to me where…
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game dev post: cooking and crafting in Weird West
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More stuff I did on Weird West: the Cooking/Crafting system. You can cook raw food over a fire or stove, use forges and tanning racks to craft weapon upgrades and armour, smelt ingots from nuggets or melt ingots back down into nuggets, etc. Arguably what I did for this ended up being a little overengineered…
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dev scoops: Fire Propagation in Weird West
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Here’s something I did on Weird West that I thought was cool: fire propagation across grass and foliage. Lots of stuff is flammable in the game, and there’s a general elemental signal system that handles most of those interactions, but foliage needed some special handling.