a few people asked last week how I made these slime metaballs in ue4, so super quick thread!
so the basics of a metaball if you're not familiar is that you have a "distance field" which is a smart way of saying a gradient
the gradient says how far any point is from something important. in our case, that's the center of the metaball
Oct 19, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
There's a few things we need to do to get wall fades working well
Some of it is purely in-shader and some requires code as well
we have a really simple shader function we can add to any objects that might block the camera, and it fades out opacity of objects based on the player's screen position.
it's a good fallback when we want trees or roofs to never really block the player's view of action
Jan 23, 2019 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
HOW I DESIGN GAME MONSTERS: a twitter thread
or, No More Zombies, a TED Talk
Work out:
👻 Desired Player Behaviour
🦇 Appearance Rule
👾 Surprise Structure
🐺 Defeat Requirements
👽 Alert Rules
👹 When to fight / to take flight
The goal of designing good monsters for me is building a cohesive experience that thrills the player and teaches them how to cope with this new threat.
We're killing off zombies because they're tired, but we love zombies (those fuckers persist) and they fit this structure
Jan 3, 2019 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
did you know that Photoshop now lets you make signed distance fields for great reduction in your decal mask sizes?
(here are the two images I'm using for above, they're 64x64 but blown up so you can see the pixel detail)
Sep 1, 2018 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
quick thread on how I put these little fake games together cheaply
I made 64x64 textures for the mock-up, then split them into four quadrants of a 128x128
