Other Things Happen in Space

By -
Hi! I'm Kelly. I make video games. Well kind of. Maybe.

Anyways, I haven't posted in like a month now. I've been really busy with fuel cells. Making money! Yay! But that's not a really great reason to not write a blog post for a long time. There is also the fact that my laptop is currently employed 24/7 in mining bitcoins, so I can't really participate in community writing sessions anymore. I have to write these posts on my PC. It's a little annoying, but I will survive. Maybe.

Bad Things

So I'm just gonna come out and say it. I'm probably not going to be working on Bad Things Happen in Space for a while. I've gotten to a point in development that it seems to be a little bit too ambitious and not all the design elements are there and the mechanics aren't solid. When I went to Boston Postmortem and I heard Eitan from Firehose Games talk about what Indies need to do to survive, he said a lot of important things (many of which I am taking to heart) but what struck me most is that they all have passion for the games they're making. I have lost my passion to make Bad Things Happen in Space. I'm not saying I won't ever pick it back up and start working on it again, but there are several other, smaller projects that I'd like to work on and maybe get something actually finished.

So, what else?

Here's a couple things. There's Magenta! The kitten eating ghost, I mentioned that before. I'm pretty deep into a fluid mechanics GPGPU simulation thingy (in the same vein as echobox), which I think I might want to adapt for Magenta! and other projects. I'm meeting with Seth Alter of Subaltern Games this Thursday (12/5/2103) to talk about maybe working on his next project. And I've got other ideas for things, too. Vorift, a first person eating simulator in the Rift, several QWOP style control-in-great-detail games, a pikmin like game where you control bugs based on Skitter from worm, and finally a sort of Minecraft on a sphere.

A few of these are just interesting technology pieces I'd like to try and implement, but some of them might turn into actually fun games. Once I get the fluid dynamics simulation figured out, I'll like try my hand at the Spherecraft thing or create a demo-prototype thing for Magenta! I can feel the passion for those things burning deep in my passion glands. It does suck that I am going to be spending at least half of my time working on fuel cell stuff until the end of the year, so I won't get to work on those things as much as I'd like. Though, I do have this weird effect of actually being more productive when I have less time. I'm not quite sure how that works.

When I finish the fluid mechanics simulation, you can probably expect me to write a post about all the nitty gritty details. Or at least expect me to say I'll write up a post on it. Fluid simulation is a pretty intense topic, but also somewhat overlapping in a lot of ways with the acoustic propagation stuff I've been working on for echobox. The fluid mechanics is, in a sense, more general than the acoustic stuff because there have been so many more people working on it. You get to see all the other ways people have tried to doing real time simulations of physical phenomena. In a way, I feel more equipped to work on echobox now than I ever have before. Too bad.

Also, I suppose I should change the name of the blog? Maybe just Pyromuffin? Cool.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

iamagamer game jam: Blood

By -
Image
I didn't actually do much development for Bad Things this week, instead I was focused on finishing up at Intel, and then there was the iamagamer.ca game jam this weekend. Along with two other people, I produced a game in 48 hours. The link to download it is here  http://jam.iamagamer.ca/submissions/53-blood , though I'll probably put up a download on this blog on an 'other projects' page. Blood! The topic was "Strong female protagonist", and my first idea was to take the concept literally and make a game about a female body builder. After some discussion among my friends, I decided to pitch a game about bleeding. One person put their name on it (someone I knew already), then I put my name on it, and we got a third person. Luckily for us, none of us had ever done a game jam before, and I was the only one with game development experience. We settled on an action platformer where your blood is both your life and your ability to attack. Each weapon or sp
Read more

How to render to HDR displays on Windows 10

By -
Image
Hey! If you missed it, yesterday I wrote an artisanal blogue poaste about a tool I am working on called the HDR injector . Today, I will write about how to present an HDR image in Windows. Some of this will be a summary of the talk by Evan Hart at GDC 2018. There are three steps, which I don't think are explained anywhere, except maybe within these ultra-rare DX12 samples that I had to catch midair from a hot tweet. Set your swapchain effect to DXGI_SWAP_EFFECT_FLIP_DISCARD . Emphasis on FLIP. The GDC talk above seems to think this isn't 100% required, but I couldn't get any HDR working without it. Set your swapchain buffer format to an HDR compatible backbuffer format. The ones that work for me are:  DXGI_FORMAT_R16G16B16A16_FLOAT and  DXGI_FORMAT_R10G10B10A2_UNORM , though I expect other formats might work. I haven't tested all of them. Depending on which format you picked in ( 2 ) you need to select the correct color space. If you  selected RGB
Read more

Reverse Engineering Unity Games

By -
Image
Hi. Today I will be writing about my efforts regarding reverse engineering unity games. As you may have read in a previous post, I have recently lost all my project files in a horrific idiot hard drive reformatting disaster. I was able to get my final builds back from some people I had sent it to... and actually, it just occurred to me yesterday that I had sent Unity QA a repro project for echobox that had almost all of the final source in it (except for the visualization portions and the level design), but they have yet to reply about sending me the project. A bug or a feature? So it turns out that reverse engineering Unity games is actually quite possible, and even somewhat easy. Is this a feature or a bug? In my case, I have a legitimate reason to reverse engineer as much code as possible from my game executables, because it will save me a ton of work trying to rebuild what I've lost. For others, I imagine this is somewhat of a headache. There is an extensive forum post  ab
Read more