This entry is a bit of a diversion from gaming, but I wanted to write about the importance of internet security, and also wanted to alert people to the way things are moving in favor of hackers these days. Initially I want to point out a few articles – the first of which was fairly prominent in the news during the summer and the rest which are just good technical articles on how evolved and trivial… Continue reading
This is the second part of my series on better looking environments in Unity. It has been a while since the first post and Unity has made a lot of improvements since then. In this part I wanted to cover the post processing effects needed to achieve a more dramatic look, like the one in the current set of screenshots that I posted over the summer, which can be found in the Media tab. With… Continue reading
The first ever Boston FIG (Boston Festival of Indie Games) happened this past Saturday and it was an amazing event to be a part of. There were over a thousand in attendance, which I think far exceeded the expected registrations for the the event. The main feature was a digital games showcase which housed a select set of indie games from the area which you could both play and vote on – with the developers themselves… Continue reading
Originally AOS was going to be a strictly top down Diablo style game. After my friend Nathan started testing out my game builds the first thing he said is you need WASD! And I just groaned and said it is supposed to be a Diablo clone. Anyway, long story short – you can play both ways at the same time now. After salivating over the nice first person vistas using the new HDR+Bloom capabilities in… Continue reading
I am still working on basic combat in AOS. One of the areas that I have just completed is driving the biped characters based on the movement stat. This stat is the first of my action stats which is in feet per second and because it is a stat will allow buffs and debuffs to automatically impact the movement rate of the character. So in a combat scenario I want the character animation and footstep… Continue reading
I have been working on the beginning of the official story for AOS. I have had lots of ideas and background material that has been percolating for years, however to actually begin the design of something that is supposed to excite, intrigue, and surprise people is extremely difficult. Having no formal training in storytelling or writing, and being cursed with a programmer’s brain, I am working at a great disadvantage. The background story is a… Continue reading
I have successfully updated my project to 3.5 and switched to using external version control, moving it into a Mercurial repository. I am still a little dismayed that Unity doesn’t work a little more smoothly with things under version control. Having a second set of meta files for everything means that you need to manage moving and renaming everything yourself and then doing the proper commands to your VCS when you do that. Workflow like… Continue reading
So the verdict is in for me – after two weeks of demon squishing I have concluded Diablo III just isn’t Diablo II or Diablo I. The magic just isn’t there. I have run two different classes now to completion and I don’t think I want to play anymore – replaying the same stuff in Nightmare just isn’t appealing. After watching the entire credits, I can’t believe how many people worked on this game and… Continue reading
The first MassDiGi Game Challenge is now over. Congrats to the finalists and the winners, and thanks to all the people who put it together and the sponsors and mentors who donated time and money, it does mean a lot to the growing game development community here in MA. All of the entries seemed really unique and innovative. I wasn’t participating with an entry but I did thoroughly enjoy the whole event. I am definitely… Continue reading
PAX EAST is is only a week away! I am happily participating this year and hopefully in many future years. I will be going to the Friday sessions and the “Made in MA” pre-Pax party. I will be giving a helping hand to Part12 Studios there – which is a local studio that does some great causal gaming apps for iOS and Android. I will also be participating in the Made in MA @ Pax… Continue reading
I have started delving into the details of actual stats and the combat mechanics related to them. I want AOS to have an action RPG feel when it comes to combat but without the tediousness of collecting and selling tons of items. The aspects I want to pull from this genre are the combat feel with the ability to tailor stats and skills through magical equipment and talismans. Being more of an adventure game the… Continue reading
I found a thread on the Unity forums on lighting tips a while ago that had many good suggestions and came up with one I posted there that people may find useful: I have been playing a bit with the lighting using the deferred lighting rendering path and dual lightmaps. I played around with a technique to make it go from day to night with the same lightmaps by changing the directional light color and… Continue reading
I recently came across a great article in ars technica during some resent news surfing – no I don’t browse CNN, I end up at places like ars and slashdot which in my opinion are REAL news sources. I am sure there are lots of kindred souls out there that feel the same. So, this article, which you should definitely read, is called ‘How close are we to truly photorealistic, real-time games?‘. I of course… Continue reading
After some research and experimentation I have begun creating a customized behavior tree implementation that is integrated into the core of my framework. Each entity of the framework can have behavior trees and will look at environment, sensory, and memory information and drive the entity through actions which are things like move, attack, cast, use, consume, and so on. There will likely be many actions and the framework will support adding additional custom actions, conditions,… Continue reading
After developing a prototype forest scene a while ago, I wanted to somehow improve the terrain textures to look sharper and have more detail. I have been thoroughly inspired by the environment art of an indie action RPG that is in the works called Grim Dawn. After some pointers by other Unity developers I recently found a way to get the terrain in Unity to incorporate bump mapping. I have been pleased with the results… Continue reading
