Category: Game development

Continuing the tradition of remastering my old games and releasing them on Steam, I turned my attention to Minimal Raider, a gamejam project that aimed to recreate the feeling of the old Tomb Raider games. I’ve always wanted to expand on it with new locations, but first I had to fix the state it was in. The climbing system had some annoyances, the graphics never really made it past low-poly pseudo-greybox, and the architecture was not ready to support multiple levels, so I rebuilt the game from the ground up in Unity 6 to improve both the look and the feel of the experience.

Significant changes:

• Improved climbing system
• New player model
• Greatly improved environments
• Greatly improved lighting
• Expanded level design
• Improved secrets placement
• Full controller support
• Steam cloud save support

Available now on Steam and Itch!

Those of you who have followed along for years may remember that back in 2009, I created a small point-and-click Western moodpiece called Coyote. Recently I returned to it to port it to Unity, polish it up, and release it on Steam. What seemed like a simple remaster turned into a bit of a passion project that adds new graphics, voiceacting, expanded interaction possibilities, rewritten story, and even a whole new scene.

All this to say I’m proud to present Coyote: A Wild West Vignette, now available on Steam and Itch!

Talking to indie devs, the topic of backing up game projects often comes up. They know they should, but they don’t know how or it seems too complicated. I was there too, but since I started using GIT, I never want to live without it. So I thought I’d write a GITting started guide (sorry). This isn’t by any means the way to do it, it’s just what I’ve found to work best for me.

Happy new year! I’m starting 2019 off right with the release of a small game I worked on at the end of 2018: Minimal Raider, my submission for the #tombraiderjam on itch.io. I’ve always been a fan of the Tomb Raider franchise, so I had to seize this opportunity to play with the formula.

It was a great learning experience working on this game. I’m no stranger to 3D level design, but I never had a third-person character who is able to traverse the space freely and climb and jump and everything. It radially changes how you layout a level. I’m using the excellent climbing system by DiasGames.

I built 80% of the level out of standard Unity cubes with different colors, and then enhanced some areas with more bespoke assets from Beffio’s Lost Lands pack. In a way you can still see a lot of the greyboxing geometry in the final version, which I think is fun, it’s like seeing the brushstrokes on a painting.

And after dancing around it for a while, I finally figured out how to lightmap a level properly. This gives everything a more natural feel, as sunlight bounces off of surfaces to illuminate others. It’s not super easy to set up and iterate on quickly, but I managed to get pretty decent results with fairly swift bake times eventually.

This is also the first time I’m using Unity Timeline in a production environment, and I liked it a lot. I had already made a 2D animation project with it previously, so I knew the basics workflow, which meant I could quickly achieve exactly what I needed for the intro and outro cinematics of this game.

And finally the post-processing effects tie it all together. Bloom is essential here ofcourse for the scorching desert sun and the contrast between inside and outside spaces, then there’s color grading, tonemapping, and motion blur to give it a more cinematic feel.

I’d love to hear what you think if you check it out!

A year ago, I released The House On Holland Hill, a short narrative game built during Wizard Jam 4. In keeping with tradition, I’m now releasing version 2 of this game, on the eve of Wizard Jam 6.

THOHH was never meant to become a highly-polished game, but I found myself still thinking about it after I released it. So a few weeks ago I decided to work on a few upgrades to make it feel less like a prototype.

Here’s what’s new:

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After two weeks of intermittent development, I finished my gamejam game (late) last sunday! I’ve polished up a few bits since then, and aside from the save system that doesn’t work yet, it’s become a pretty solid offering. And more tweaks and polish are probably coming in the next few weeks.

You can download the game from https://hedgefield.itch.io/hollandhill. Let me know what you thought of it if you play it!

The demo for Last Voyage of the Orlova has been running for two weeks in a corner of VondelCS, and in that time Unity Analytics has been quietly tracking some key events in the game. Here’s a quick breakdown of those numbers:

It’s hard to say exactly how many people played the game, but I know 107 made it through the first few minutes and fired up the lighthouse.

77 hopefuls then entered the derelict ship floating through the mist.

41 of them figured out how to open the engineering deck and end the lockdown.

35 then made it to the front deck and found the axe.

They swung that axe 708 times, altogether. Wowzers.

And finally, 23 hardcore problem-solvers made it to the end of the demo.

These numbers are pretty impressive considering it’s running on an unattended fully-functional windows machine in some cafe hallway, away from any kind of gaming expo context, and without any strong tutorial content. It also shows that I could do some stronger foreshadowing in certain areas, but it might as well be that people had to move on or weren’t invested enough to explore further.

All in all, I’m glad I added the analytics in last-minute.

Some people asked me how I’m doing the water reflections in Last Voyage Of The Orlova, so here’s a quick look at the shader. Download at the bottom of the post.

The solution consists of two components: a shader for the groundwork, and a script to render it on a quad.

The shader has a texture slot and a color picker. The texture is optional, you can just change the water color using the color picker.

The script has settings for the reflection resolution, offset, and which layers should be reflected. I keep the resolution intentionally low (256) because otherwise the reflection is too perfect and it doesn’t look like water anymore. And I like the way it shimmers when you walk.

I’ve packaged the files up so you can try this in your own project right now:
Click here to download.

To get started, add these files to your project’s Assets folder, and drag the reflection prefab into your scene. You can adjust the size and position of the prefab to your needs.

Let me know here or on twitter if you use it, I’d love to see it in action in other places.

If you’re looking to add waves (with physics!) to the water surface, the Zippy Water 2D asset is pretty good. I applied this shader to their water prefab and it works.