Last night, Abner announced on his Twitch stream that Jai is close to beta release. He showed a list of items that Jon Blow and the Jia Team have agreed need to be completed and then they will release the beta. No date or timeline was specified but based on the visible todo list, it is my opinion, this will happen before the end of the year.
I'm pretty excited for this to happen. ...
Today is a special day for me. It is Day 1 of my Indie adventure! I’m pretty excited and a bit scared!I'll be blogging about my experience, and I think I'll do some streaming as well. I haven't made any solid decisions at this point and this was intentional. I'm a bit burned out from my day job and I need some time to rest and rejuvenate. I don't want to make any decisions until those stres...
I attended Unity’s Conference, Unite, in Austin this year. There are a lot of interesting improvements coming down the pipeline but nothing ground shaking. I think the biggest announcement was for artists: direct integration with Autodesk’s Maya and Max. Other things I’m looking forward to are:
the integration of TextMesh Pro
the new Asset Bundle system
the new Entity framework
the 2D...
Update: Unity has announced some changes here: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/06/16/evolution-of-our-products-and-pricing/ I've made edits below to reflect them.
There will not be a Unity 6, just continual improvements.
All Platforms
All Royalty Free
All Engine Features
Personal will remain free, limits revenue to $100,000 a year and you must show a Made With Unity splash screen.
P...
I watched Jonathan Blow's talk How To Design Deep Games with Jonathan Blow which is actually kind of a misleading title because the talk is about the concept of "Deep Work" and how to sustain work on a long project. This is one of those talks where you need to watch it a few times, so these notes are probably not capturing the full picture.
What is "Deep Work"?
Changes you, you are a diffe...
I watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi on Jonathan Blow's recommendation, he calls it an example of "Deep Work." Jiro Ono makes sushi, and has been doing it for 75 years. Jiro has seemingly limitless passion and commitment to the craft of sushi. He is on a literal life long journey exploring, reaching, testing and experimenting with all elements of what great, perfect sushi IS. He pursues this perfecti...
Jonathan Blow did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit Friday: I am Jonathan Blow, game development person; ask me stuff.I was specifically interesting in advice type tidbits, here are my notes.Who Is Jonathan Blow?Game designer and programmer for the games Braid and The Witness; Partner in angle investor Indie Fund; And creator of programming JAI.
Wikipedia Twitter Homepage YouTube
What advise...
I decided to do an experiment this month and make some Let's Play YouTube videos. I'm playing Crusader Kingdoms 2 with the Horse Lords DLC and playing House Dulo, the Khan of Bolghar who is related to the King of Bulgaria. Here's the playlist: Horse Lords of BolgharI'm up to 70 total videos now and my Let's Code, Following Catlike Coding's Tutorial Swirly Pipe, Part 1 , is still the most po...
Here's a small tech demo I've been working on. It's the application of the Voronoi Algorithm to a map's political boundaries as two players place bases or cities. It was written in Unity3D and essentially the system continuously loops over each cube and determines which of the existing bases (or mouse) is closest. One quirk, is there is a limit to how far away a cube can be or it will simpl...
Jonathan Blow of Braid fame gave a really interesting Twitch/YouTube talks about making a new language to replace C/C++ that is specifically for making games with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ . I'm very interested and his rationals resonates a lot with me. I gave up C/C++ long, long ago because it was so messy and conveluted. This could totally bring me back to a "bare metal...
An extremely interesting article has been published in The New Yorker this week: THE OPEN-OFFICE TRAP I think this is a very important read. It has a lot of reasons why the conventional wisdom that open offices and cubes are good for productivity are wrong. Here are two excerpts that really got my attention (I added the bold emphasis) :
... found that as the number of people working in a ...
Here's a wonderful webcomic about sustainable creativity by Stephen McCraine. It has some great insight and perspective on procrastination and finishing projects.Start From the BeginningJump to:How to Fight ProcrastinationHow to Deal with FailureHow to Move Towards Big GoalsAlso, he's doing a Kickstarter to make a physical book version: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stephenmccranie/bric...
Updated 2014-01-16This is a question I hear a lot and here's what I've learned:
2013
Race the Sun [source]
ittle Dew [source]
Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians [source]
Legend of Dungeon [source]
Shadowrun: Returns [source]
Kentucky Route Zero [source]
Gone Home [source]
Surgeon Simulator 2013 [source]
Starforge [source]
Space Hulk [source]
Lunar Flight [sour...
This evening I worked on basic boiler plate stuff. I put some stuff up on github including Futile QuickStart I even made a pull request for Futile.I pretty much spent the rest of evening fighting my font code. Fonts took way too long because I though I was running the latest version of Futile, but it turned out I wasn’t. I got confused about my github pull and which package I imported. Exact...
Updated 8/08/2013
Where to Start?
Tips on your "First Game"
Indie Game Design Do-s and Don't-s: A Manifesto
Indie Resources @ Pixel Prospector
Choosing an Engine
What’s it like to make a game in Unity?
What is the best 2D game engine?
Inspiration
Indie Game: The Movie
Small Worlds by David Shute (I explain why)
Braid by Jonathan Blow
How Games Work
A trip throug...
One my achomplishments of the holidays was the sucessful launch of WAUUG or the Washington (DC) Area Unity3D Users Group.http://capitalgames.tumblr.com/post/35807468762/dc-devs-drop-some-knowledge-at-first-unity3d-users
Futile is a framework that allows you to control rendering within Unity programmatically. This is a boon to anyone interested in 2D games and finds, like myself, that Unity impedes 2D game development.
Get Futile from Github
Import the Futile.unitypackage into you Unity project, Assets->Import Package->Custom Package...
Create an Empty GameObject and call it Futile Camera, GameObje...
I came across this very good video on adding juiciness to games:Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri PurhoYou can also:
Play the Game
Get the Code
