UE4 - list blueprint assets by type

I'm busy working on a project in unreal lately, and ran into the desire to enumerate a list of blueprint assets from a folder. This post has a simple solution.

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new game+ / Celeste launches tomorrow!

Celeste is a game I had the privilege of working on, and it launches tomorrow (25th Jan) on Switch, PS4, Steam and the day after (26th Jan) for Xbox One!
All the details are here

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game designer's bench: Golf Story

I've been playing Golf Story on the Switch and was pleasantly surprised. It's weird but in a good way, and I like a lot of things about it. Some things about it mechanically and overall bother me, so I brought it to the bench to ponder why!

note: there are very minor (but not really) spoilers.
also note: you don't have to have played to find this interesting reading, I hope.
also note note: If you want to enjoy it without me whispering "this is weird?" while you play, play it first!

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game engines: using ALL the languages

In the 1.0/long term version of my engine, I designed the core runtime to expose it's API in such a way that it would be agnostic to a scripting language. This is a short post on how that looks, when you connect the dots.

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announcing 'errent' & album release

Today is another day to talk about things I've done since I was a kid, but haven't put much out there publicly! I've been playing and making music since I was young, but it's always been instruments and done live. Today I can say different.

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Sky Rogue 1.0 (I did a thing!)

Sky Rogue is a fun fast paced rogue-lite flight simulator that oozes with style. I knew the developer for some time and enjoyed playing the game, but was also fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do some writing for it as well! The release of V1.0 is out today too.

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OBJ parser: easy parse time triangulation

For some reason whenever I wrote a quick obj parser, I never bothered to think about the case where the faces in the file had more than 3 points. It was easier in the moment to just triangulate the meshes before loading them in the 3D app. In practice on

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c++11 constexpr fnv1a compile time hash

I've been working with some c++ lately and had previously been using static hash values for strings (similar to this from the Bitsquid blog) but the one thing that bothered me was the lack of ability to use them in switch statements, where I often want to use them. With constexpr in c++11, I can.

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Drifter 0.6.9 to 0.6.13 released

Drifter updates have been weekly so I collated the last few updates into one post. The updates are live on Steam and the Humble store.

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HTO 06 “kd”

◎ HTO project archives
     ○ ë̤̰́̄ͪntry 06 – “kd”

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HTO 05 “kn”

◎ HTO project archives
     ○ ë̤̰́̄ͪntry 05 – “kn”

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HTO 04 “kh”

◎ HTO project archives
     ○ ë̤̰́̄ͪntry 04 – “kh”

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HTO 03 “ka”

◎ HTO project archives
     ○ ë̤̰́̄ͪntry 03 – “ka”

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HTO 02 “ki”

◎ HTO project archives
     ○ ë̤̰́̄ͪntry 02 – “ki”

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HTO 01 “kx”

◎ HTO project archives
     ○ entry 01 – “kx”

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Drifter 0.6.8 released

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The ninth Narcissus update for Drifter!
The update is live on Steam and the Humble store.

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Drifter 0.6.7 released

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The eight Narcissus update for Drifter is out!
The update is live on Steam and the Humble store.

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Drifter 0.6.6 released

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The seventh Narcissus update for Drifter is out!
The update is live on Steam and the Humble store.

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Drifter 0.6.5 released

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The sixth Narcissus update for Drifter is out!

The update is live on Steam and the Humble store.

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Drifter 0.6.4 released

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The fifth Narcissus update for Drifter is out!

The update is live on Steam and the Humble store.

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PROJECT CEDAR DEV#3

Continued, A short dev post about a tiny stealth game in http://pico-8.com.

For something I'm just slowly making for fun on the side of my side-side projects it has been fun to isolate scope so heavily. Here's a short update of how it's going.

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Art: Bombernauts Workshop Banner

Have you played Bombernauts? It's available on Steam and is a whole lot of fun. It's a great multiplayer game by Tyler Glaiel with art by Sven Ruthner and audio by Brandon McCartin.

For the most recent update – which adds Steam workshop support (full patch notes) – Tyler mentioned needing a hand with a banner quick, and I was in a good position to help out and was happy to help some friends in a bind.

bombernauts

I painted the banner based on some of the power ups in the game, below is the final banner we ended up with. The other Sven painted the robot part, and I merged it into this scene and did the rest. I had a lot of fun painting this!

Check the game out, and bring some friends since it's a good game in groups :D

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PROJECT CEDAR DEV#2

Continued, A short dev post about a tiny stealth game in http://pico-8.com.

I had a short break from working on this, while waiting for pico-8 0.1.4. In the meantime I had finished blocking in all the details of the narrative and how that all ties together. I planned a lot of levels on paper and graphed out some ideas for overall structure, and I've done a lot of other stuff that would spoil things if I posted about them at the moment.

Here's a less spoilery, vague, outdated graph diagram before I talk a bit about what I've been doing here.

project cedar graph outdated graph diagram

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Drifter 0.6.3 released

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The fourth Narcissus update for Drifter is out!

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fix iconutil El Capitan "Unsuported image format"

Just a short post with a really obscure error from iconutil, after an El Capitan upgrade.

If you run a command similar to:
iconutil -c icns some.iconset -o some.icns

And you get (sic):
error: Unsuported image format

Here are two important things:

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PROJECT CEDAR DEV#1

As mentioned, I am making a small stealth game in http://pico-8.com.

I've made quite a bit of progress today so here is a short gif. I now have all the systems in place, and can move on to finishing out the levels and narrative, and higher level ideas. Read more below for the gif and more info.

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Drifter 0.6.2 released

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The third Narcissus update for Drifter is out!

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PROJECT CEDAR

Making a small stealth game in http://pico-8.com.

You should check out pico-8, it's really great.

projectcedar

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Art: Storage Container (in 3D)

Recently for http://driftergame.com/ we decided to try out http://sketchfab.com for showing off some work in progress assets for the game. Here's how that recently mentioned storage container looks in 3D. Click through to spin it around!

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Year of Drifter!

!

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Art: Drifter Merchant

A (wip) concept for Drifter. A merchant ship, that hangs around and is really big - even the tiny pixels on the loading bay, around the shuttle, are a bit big for human scale in comparison!

Don't forget, the game is available already - you can find out how and where to get it on the Drifter site.

drifter_merchant_ship_concept

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Invisible, Inc fan art

James is one of the designers on Invisible, Inc - An excellent turn based procedural stealth game that's coming out in a few days. You should definitely consider picking it up - Klei games are usually well worth the time.

While he was streaming some of the hardest game mode, I decided to make some fan art for the game. It's a really quick sketch, so it is what it is! Enjoy!

Click for the full size (scan lines get weird in small view)

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Haxe Entry Point

A title with two meanings, what have we here!

Recently I wrote about Haxe from 1000ft, which looks a the way Haxe fits together, how it's flexibility makes it difficult to explain, and how an onlooker might better understand it.

This post is a follow up, and discusses what happens if you were interested in using Haxe for something, and were curious about the entry point from a user perspective.

To tackle the basic usage and understanding of the Haxe environment, we will write an example command line tool using Haxe.

This is a continuation of a series on Haxe itself, which you can find all related and future posts under the “haxe” tag.

haxe.org

Here is part one.
This is part two.

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Drifter 0.6.1 released

0.6.1 header

Relatively hot on the heels of 0.6.0, here is the second release in the Narcissus update series to Drifter.

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Haxe from 1000ft

I often run into people confused as to how to use Haxe or, where exactly it fits into a project pipeline.

For the newcomer, Haxe is a high level modern programming toolkit that compiles to a multitude of languages (c#, c++, java, js, python, php, etc). You can visit Haxe.org for a closer look - in the mean time, here is a broad strokes view of what Haxe is and can do.

haxe.org

This is part one.
Here is part two.

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Art: Drifter new icons

Some new icons I have been making for Drifter!

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Drifter 0.6.0 released

0.6.0 header

After a few months of working on it, we have just released the 0.6.0 update to Drifter on Steam and the Humble Store.

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Art: Drifter interior update

Hello again, the next preview of the interiors is here, this time in large group format. The newest one is the ship dealer, bottom right. The bottom left is the comex!

Click for larger version

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Art: Drifter interior update

Here's another WIP render of an interior from Drifter, which is available to buy directly from us or on Steam.

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Art : Drifter interior update

So I have been working on these interiors for quite some time (basically forever) but they are finally coming together. Here's a render of the pilots quarters, a WIP.

 

Pilot Quarters

Drifter WIP

Remember you can get Drifter already directly from us and have hours of fun while we work on wrapping up the rest.

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Art : new Drifter ships

Part of the bigger update we have been busy working on for Drifter includes a couple of new playable ships. Some of them come from the same manufacturer, and some are cut down smuggling ships streamlined for speed. You can see a preview below, click to view the large version.

new ships

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Yosemite OSX file open bug solution

Yosemite is fantastic. I am really enjoying using it and the visual refresh is something I had looked forward to for a while - but after a couple of hours using it I hit a pretty weird bug that would prevent applications from using the file open dialog more than once.

Read below for what is causing it for me, and a safe solution/workaround.

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haxe: compile time macros

Haxe is a really great language for me. It does cross platform in a sensible way - by compiling and generating code to a target language. The best part is that it's not just converting, it's properly compiling the code - so all errors are caught by the compiler itself long before the generated code even gets there.

One of its most powerful features is the macro system which allows you to run haxe code at compile time, to augment and empower your existing haxe code. It sounds crazy - so let's dig in.

haxe.org

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Art : texture toys

Working on these interiors, some interesting stuff comes up when working on the texturing. Just some random images of things that happenstanced their way about.

Three images in order of no color and spec, no color, and color and lighting.

Don't forget you can play Drifter already, on Steam or direct purchase from us while you wait :)

http://celsiusgs.com/drifter

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why snõwkit

This post is a short reasoning and history post about creating the snowkit collective and especially, the initial set of libraries.

If you haven't yet, please read the announcement post first.

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announcing snõwkit

 
I have spent my spare time in the last ~year and a half or something creating a set of libraries, all the while gathering like minded developers to foster a new collective for the Haxe programming toolkit.

The most important of these is a cross platform game engine called luxe, for deploying games to Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and WebGL from the same code.

Haxe is a powerful tool for me with an important role in cross platform development and I wanted to help empower the Haxe eco system in the best way I know how - show, don't tell.

snowkit logo

Find out more below.

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Past: js1k spring 2013

Past: is a look back at some older things I created.

For the 2013 spring js1k (javascript 1 kilobyte of code) challenge, I submitted a small 3D based canvas demo for fun. I just wanted to explore writing a simple 3D projection in 1k for myself, which turned out ok.

screenshot

Original description:

3D projections in 2D, 50x50 grid mathed about with.

Click Read More to view right here.

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Shaders : second stage

The second part in a series on understanding shaders, covering how data gets sent between shaders and your app, how shaders are created and more.

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Art: Drifter interior update

I have been plodding along through concepting, building, and texturing a whole bunch of station interior scenes for Drifter, this space trading game we are making.
 
You can get the game immediately and play it, on Steam or directly from us.
 
I will posting breakdowns of the stages of an interior and all the things I have learned along the way, as this is the first time I have ever made anything this large scale and it was incredibly challenging at best. Lot's to learn from.
 
This is a sneak preview of some of the textures I have been making (click to enlarge):
 
 
To follow along, you can subsribe to this blog (top right of post), or follow me on twitter, or follow the lead dev Colin here.
 

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tinkering - weekend jamming

Over the weekend I spent a few hours making a little something, that might turn into a tiny game with a friend if time permits. Updates will be posted on my twitter first, but i'll post here if it goes further too.

Made in my own engine, which you will hear more about here and on twitter in good time.

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Primer : Shaders

A common theme I run into when talking to some developers is that they wish they could wrap their head around shaders. Shaders always seem to solve a lot of problems, and often are referenced as to the solution to the task at hand.

But just as often they are seen as a sort of enigma or black box - one that is so shrouded in complexity that it makes learning them from ”basic” examples near impossible.

Hopefully, this primer will help those that aren't well versed and help transition into using shaders, where applicable.

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Drifter now available on Steam

The game we have been making is now available on Steam Early Access. View a trailer on the store page, or click the full link for an embedded trailer.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/259450

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Photoshop workflow one

This is part one of a few posts on specific things I find indispensable when using Photoshop to work on concept art, illustrations, sketches and design work.

Part one includes the first of the most important set of tools for working non-destructively - Smart Objects.

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I will be a speaker at GDC

Actually on a panel! Talking and answering questions about programming in the video game industry, alongside some amazingly talented folks.

I am honored to be afforded the opportunity.

http://schedule.gdconf.com/session-id/828114

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Art: new Drifter concept art

More sketching on the ship dealer, mission office, pilot quarters and a timelapse video of the comex, showing how I paint these for Drifter.

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Understanding Realtime Multiplayer

An article I wrote about understanding realtime multiplayer. Includes theory, plenty of links and diagrams and includes a working demo on github written in HTML5 with client and server for 1 vs 1 realtime multiplayer.

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L-systems and procedural generation

L-systems are a generation system that uses a simple descriptor to define fractal patterns that can be useful for many things, like trees, streets and more. This post goes over the way they look and how they work.

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Pathing excursions

I enjoy messing with path finding algorithms and finding interesting ways to obtain the results, this is about a few more recent attempts.

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About Notes

Notes is a blog about developing games. Discussing art, programming, technical issues and short posts about what I am working on.

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