Many years ago when I was a tiny baby making InFlux (of which there is now a Redux), I had no idea what I wanted to do with it narratively, if anything. Because, from a young age, he had humoured me, I emailed Gabe Newell about it, knowing he was in the habit of either replying or forwarding to someone he thought might reply. I got some good thoughts back from David Speyrer, who’s been at Valve since ’99, which I shall publish here now because at a party last night someone was interested.| joe wintergreen internet zone
In my last article I wrote about some tooltip optimization to reduce the start time of the Unreal Editor by 2-5 seconds. Turns out people do really care about their editor start time. So much that …| Larst Of Us
I finally caved and started playing Hollow Knight a couple days ago. This is a huge accomplishment cause I don't pick up or play many new video games these d...| knives for cats
The Weird West side project (called Overdrive) that I started working on some time back is something I rarely find the time to advance, despite having a lot of ideas about, but lately I have a little bit. The other day I smashed out a conversation system! I really love the result (video below) – […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
The first feature I worked on at Wolfeye when I came on board as (what ended up being credited as) a Systems Designer/Technical Designer was the vultures. As well as being ambiently cool, the vultures play a role a bit like the rats in Dishonored, showing up when there’s dead stuff around and conveniently disposing […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I am once again aimlessly enjoying the Unreal level design tool Scythe, which I get to test early builds of. Here’s 40 minutes or so’s messing around today using Half-Life: Alyx textures. It’s really a lot of fun.| joe wintergreen internet zone
A while ago I made a cool effect for Sleight of Hand, where (since you hide in clouds of smoke sometimes in this magic-themed game), we were experimenting with a type of lantern that guards could carry around and it would dispel any smoke or fog around the light. The fog is all volumetric, so […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Porygon asked (on the Steam community hub): Am I the only one who has the movement physics feel… off sometimes? I don’t remember the first game feeling like this, but maybe that’s my memory being bad. I feel like the marble’s movement and inertia is inconsistent and “muddy”, especially in outdoor areas for some reason. […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I continue to spend time screwing around in Scythe. It’s so fun to finally be making maps again properly in Unreal. Some of the folks in my discord took to scything on stream and a couple times a bunch of us have just chatted and scythed, it’s a good vibe. All this stuff took no […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
This is a “texture browser” utility widget for UE5.5 that presents materials in the style you’d expect from a level editor in the 90s: as square thumbnails. Unreal normally presents materials in the content browser as lit and mapped to a sphere. This isn’t useful for much. When you’re making a level, you want to actually see the images you’re working with. So this plugin presents them that way. It looks like Hammer’s texture […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
If you use UE5, you might have noticed there’s a new-ish feature called Data-Driven Console Variables, and you might also have noticed that nothing comes up when you Google this. There’s not much to it, but in the interests of having something come up when you Google this, here’s what I’ve figured out about data-driven […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Unreal has a reputation amoung the ill-informed for being plagued by shader compilation stutter. As an attribute of Unreal itself, this is basically made up – devs are just not always doing what they are supposed to do pre-ship to avoid this issue. I’ll elaborate, but basically, to avoid compiling shaders during gameplay, you want […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I’ve been testing a friend’s WIP level design plugin for Unreal for a while now, and while it’s still very early, it’s available now on Patreon and you should support it there. It’s bringing Source 2 style geometry editing to Unreal, allowing level design to properly be a thing again, and I made a video […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I guess in April 2023 (holy shit that is longer ago than I thought) I started making a little car game prototype, sorta inspired by Micro Machines/MASHED/Re Volt etc, and I got back into it a bit recently. I guess so far I’ve probably worked on it for under two weeks cumulatively but it’s starting […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
At the moment I’m a Senior Technical Designer at RiffRaff Games, working on a stealth game about a witch. We demoed some new stuff at Day of the Devs the other week. You should check it out, probably!| joe wintergreen internet zone
For years, more or less annually, the bit of the internet where gamers and game developers overlap has kicked off with aggro debate about “yellow paint”, a handholdy game trope where the player is constantly told explicitly what to do and where to go. I always feel a bit insane when this happens. A player […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Just spent some time making a comparison/developer thoughts video of InFlux Redux (2024) vs the original InFlux (2013), which was fun. Here’s me opening the editors for both projects side-by-side and saying whatever it occurs to me to say about the development process(es). Get set for 50 whole minutes of unrehearsed dev thoughts| joe wintergreen internet zone
Small Victorian Child asked: dear mr wintergreen, when will my father (colloquially known as Good Level Design Tools) return from the war? yours trulysmall victorian child The answer may surprise you. Good Level Design Tools did not, as many have supposed, perish in the Great War, and they are about to return (in an Unreal […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
In some of my spare time, I’ve been having fun screwin’ around building something out of Weird West assets and concepts, which Wolfeye kindly don’t mind me doing and sharing. I worked on Weird West for years and always wanted to make something else out of their art, which looks amazing close-up. Here’s a video […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Here’s a tool I made a while back that you can buy: it lets you automatically create instanced materials for many textures at once, given a base material with parameters to fill. This saves you a lot of time if you have a lot of textures you want to turn into material instances, like: 200 […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
That’s what I’d be saying if I remembered to make this post several days ago when it came out. It is out, though! You should buy it on Steam and leave a positive review. 11 years after the original and some amount of years after I started working on it, here’s a blog post about […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
One of the things I’m not is an animator, but every few years I give it a crack, and recently I gave it a crack inside Unreal, which now has really good rigging and animating tools. I made a complete Max Payne dive – sideways, front and back, all blending together just like in the […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I had a moan about XCOM 1 being prettier than XCOM 2 the other day and got some nice replies from the Art Director of both, Greg Foertsch. Having replayed both again just lately, it’s striking to me how much more interesting 1 is visually. It uses baked lighting (Unreal’s Lightmass, first seen in Gears […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Here is an incomplete list of unreal engine plugins that I like Mesh Tool by Nate Mary is a general modeling tool and the best way to do level design in the editor, though UE5’s CubeGrid tool is really good too (but has fewer functions than this). You can use both together, both just output […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Way before Half-Life Alyx had been announced, I spent a couple of days one Christmas remaking Half-Life 2’s headcrabs (using their existing art and anims) in UE4, but with additional physical reactivity – they can lose their footing and struggle to recover, smash into things and active-ragdoll around after a bad jump, get picked up […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
in the unreal engine, edsplash.bmp is the name of the splash image presented to the user while the editor loads. projects without a custom edsplash.bmp are considered especially heinous. often a given edsplash will never be seen outside its development studio. but sometimes an edsplash escapes onto the internet. these are their stories in reply […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
For those unfamiliar with it, Ludum Dare is a thrice-annual game creation competition in which you must create an entire game from scratch (including art, music, etc) in 48hrs. Participating is a lot of fun and really forces me to exercise my game designer muscles and dive into other parts of the game development process … Continue reading "Ludum Dare 42 Post-mortem: Escape from the Alliance"| Jimbly's Wanderings
When preparing for PAX East I saw this article from another indie dev, found it quite useful, and thought I’d share my experience, also as a first time exhibitor, complete with lot of interesting numbers. My Booth I exhibited Splody, my multiplayer action game that supports any number of players. I wanted to showcase this, … Continue reading "Indie Exhibiting at PAX East"| Jimbly's Wanderings
Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.| Games by Mason
If there is one thing the Unreal Engine doesn’t suffer from, it is it’s lack of features. Over the past years it has been transformed from “just” a game engine into an ̵…| Larst Of Us
You'd think it funny that someone who, growing up, wasn't allowed to have any kind of games console or access to a computer that could run games and was regu...| knives for cats
We take a little break from our “What Makes A Game Tick” series to get a little bit philosophical about the topic of performance and what it means for different people.| mropert.github.io
Let’s talk about game simulations. In this episode we go back to code architecture and check out a few approaches to using multiple threads.| mropert.github.io
Well, we're back! A smaller update this week (fortnight? month?). Once again, I appreciate all the support people have given me. It's really helped. Right now, I'm in 'keeping the lights on' mode, so even the small donations can mean a day| Luna's Blog
This weekend (and Monday), I participated in Ludum Dare 37. 5 years ago, I also participated in Ludum Dare, for the first time. A lot has changed in those 5 year| Luna's Blog
Note: This article was originally published in two parts on Gamasutra (now Game Developer) in 2007 and may be found here . Though I have ma...| blog.stevewetherill.com
I show a new web-playable game I'm working on, the rationale and philosophy behind it, as well as a detailed Godot 4 tutorial that outlines my process step by step.| Fortress of Doors
Let’s talk about game simulations. Today we look at some more real life script performance issues and discuss the two hard problems in computer science.| mropert.github.io
As much as I was really excited about working on earlier this year, and making a lot of progress on it, I think my fighting games brainworms have been wanin...| knives for cats
Explore how to use raylib for game development with the newly free CLion for non-commercial use and manage dependencies with the Conan C++ package manager plugin.| blog.conan.io
A new version of GeeXLab is ready. GeeXLab is scriptable prototyping engine to create 2D/3D applications in Lua, Python3 and GLSL (OpenGL and Vulkan).| HackLAB
I’m excited to reveal my latest project: BioMenace Remastered – an official modern re-release of the DOS classic with enhanced graphics, refined gameplay, and quality of life improvements. Wa…| Lethal Guitar
So recently my favourite games conference, the Queerness and Games Conference, announced that in September 2025, they'll be hosting the conference in person for the first time since I last went in 2018! I can't describe how happy and excited this has me, especially considering the event is going to be fully masked and they'll be taking precautions to mitigate any spread of COVID-19, making it accessible enough for me to attend without worry of putting the people around me at risk. QGCon 2018 ...| knives for cats
When optimizing a program for performance it’s very common that you spend a lot of time on only a handful of different functions, simply because they are the ones that show up in the profiler the most often. But 99% of your written lines will probably never be looked at during optimization, because they are […]| Larst Of Us
Of course, anyone who programs is a programmer by definition. But after teaching programming to game development students for four years, I know that there are a lot of students who wouldn’t dream of calling themselves programmers – they just started programming because, well, someone has to. Because there always comes a point when a […]| Larst Of Us
“Optimizing a game” and “developing a game” are two activities that tend to blur together. And while you probably have an elaborate toolbox for developing your game, when it comes to optimizing the performance of a game, those tools may not be enough. In optimizing various aspects of games, I have tried many tools over […]| Larst Of Us
Unreal’s outliner is probably one of the most used panels of the editor. It’s the main tool for finding and organizing actors in a level, especially when the level is too complex to find everything in the main viewport. And admittedly, it’s actually quite fast, even when working with large complex levels. Even when working […]| Larst Of Us
Most of the time, when a game struggles to reach a certain framerate, the problem lies in its visuals. All the fancy rendering features that modern engines offer these days, such as Global Illumination, Subsurface Scattering and so on, can easily overwhelm any gaming machine, no matter how much money you have spent on it. […]| Larst Of Us
In my last article (link) I described how to fix Unreal’s weird way of numbering duplicated mesh sockets. Fortunately, this was a quick and easy fix, but even then I wrote that the editor isn…| Larst Of Us
Static mesh sockets are one of Unreal’s most basic (and probably most used) features. Their main function is to mark arbitrary positions within a mesh so that code and blueprints can access t…| Larst Of Us
I mentioned in my year summary that I have a lot to say about ECS, and got several requests to write more about it, so I’ll do an attempt to write up my thoughts here.| Voxagon Blog
A new version of GeeXLab is ready. GeeXLab is scriptable prototyping engine to create 2D/3D applications in Lua, Python3 and GLSL (OpenGL and Vulkan).| HackLAB
1 - Downloads Downloads GeeXLab 0.62.0 lite (win64) (201MB) GeeXLab 0.62.0 full (win64) (433MB) GeeXLab 0.62.0 nano (win64) (10MB) GeeXLab 0.62.0 (win32) (80MB) GeeXLab 0.62.0 (linux 64-bit) (GLIBC 2.31 - 62MB) All GeeXLab Downloads Forum thread Discord server 2 - Release Notes GeeXLab 0.62.0 is available for Windows 32/64-bit and Linux 64-bit (GLIBC 2.31). This new version of GeeXLab| HackLAB
In December 1993, just before Christmas, we arrived in Las Vegas after a flight from Heathrow with a connection in Seattle. Taking time off from my job at Electronic Arts UK, Elsbeth and I were visiting my former business partner from Eldritch The Cat Ltd, Mark McCubbin. Mark had moved to Las Vegas earlier that year to work at Westwood Studios on games like Hand of Fate and Lands of Lore. He would kindly host us in his apartment for the duration of our visit. While the main purpose of our tri...| Steve Wetherill
Nodes of Yesod on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum ca. 1985 This is an interview I did with El Mundo Del Spectrum (original link in the Spanish lan...| blog.stevewetherill.com
An implementation of a discrete item probability queue in C#. I wrote this to implement rarity based distribution of items in my game Rabanaz.| Musing Mortoray
As the year concludes I wanted to give a small update on what I’ve been working on. From a technology perspecitve this has been one of the most intense years in a long time! I’ve had the opportunity to spend most of my time researching new technologies and algorithms for our next voxel engine. Here’s a summary:| Voxagon Blog
We are near the end of 2024 and I wanted to write up a long post about the current state of the rendering in Wicked Engine. If you are interested in graphics programming, then strap yourself in for a long read through some coarse brain dump, without going in too deep to any of the […]| Wicked Engine
🔗 Lexy’s Labyrinth 🔗 Source code on GitHub 🔗 itch.io later Here is Lexy’s Labyrinth, a web-based Chip’s Challenge emulator. It’s easy to get into and mostly speaks for itself, so here is a story.| fuzzy notepad
GeeXLab 0.60.0, the best prototyping engine in the known universe and beyond, is out on Windows, Linux and Raspberry Pi platforms with bug fixes + improvements. The post GeeXLab 0.60 released for Windows, Linux and ARM64 first appeared on HackLAB.| HackLAB
Last time, we investigated the routine Duke Nukem 1 uses to create its mirror surface floor effect. In this post, we’ll have a look at one of the effects found in the sequel: Underwater areas…| Lethal Guitar
Quick post for this time. Seems my game, Penance has been uploaded on Steam by someone who I don't know, completely without my permission. They're selling my free game and of course I'm not gonna get any money from their sales. If you stumble on this game outside of this page: https://akselmo.itch.io/penancethen it's not uploaded by me! It's also very likely those illegal copies are also bundled with malware. I have done a DMCA claim for the game already. I'm not going to link the fake link h...| AksDev
Rotate what now? Aks, what are you talking about? I wanted to write down how I made the enemy characters in Artificial Rage rotate towards the player, since I couldn't find a simple answer. Most things I found was math. Now math is fun and good, but when you're tired and want to get one thing just to work at 4 am, it's not gonna help you. Especially since I've never learned linear algebra at any school I've went to (or I just likely don't remember), and double especially since all the math li...| AksDev
Today in Gaming On Linux discord group I was told that "I don't care about my playerbase" by one person and I got so frustrated I decided to write a blogpost about this. That's fucking insulting and just false. Note: The mods of the discord group apologized to me and have said this was the persons last warning. The group itself is nice and helpful. Anyway, here's the whole story: We were discussing the Unity+MalwareAdCompanyWhichNameIDontRemember merger. Paraphrasing, I said something along t...| AksDev
Bit of sad news: I had to cancel my ARPG project "Loputon." Loputon was going to be retro aesthetic 3D first person dungeon crawling game, with 6 player races, random generated dungeons, leveling and inventory system. But, in the end, I realised.. It's just too much for me alone. So I am sorry for those who waited for the project. But I felt like I was doing the project a disservice, if I was going to "force it through." I wouldn't have enjoyed making the game, thus the game wouldn't have tur...| AksDev
I just wanted to quickly recap how I got collisions working in Raylib with firstperson camera and the level itself. It took me some time to realise how to get it work but with the help of Raylib discord, I managed to do it! Just a note: Since this collision method uses bounding boxes, this will only work if your level consists of multiple meshes: Every mesh should ideally be one building block. For example, if you want to make a tunnel, you should make it from four meshes, instead of one with...| AksDev
I’ve tried many, many creative outlets and other hobbies. I’ve tried writing, drawing, painting, playing guitar, playing piano and some more. I’ve tried many hobbies among gaming, such as football (not handegg) and airsoft (which I actually really liked). But every time, I’ve quit those things. I’ve maybe tried to pick them up later, but end up quitting. I just never got that something out of them. So I only had gaming as my hobby. Before I explain how I got into actual gamedev, I...| AksDev
