game dev post: cooking and crafting in Weird West
More stuff I did on Weird West: the Cooking/Crafting system.| joe wintergreen internet zone
More stuff I did on Weird West: the Cooking/Crafting system.| joe wintergreen internet zone
Some years ago I did a quest scripting tool for an ill-fated open-world game I was contracting on. It was ages ago now, the project’s concluded, and nothing here identifies any of it, so I’m sure nobody’ll mind if I talk about my approach a bit here.| joe wintergreen internet zone
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
yeah so i was playing no man’s sky once and i was on a space station and suddenly every vert’s position on one of the horizontal axes collapsed to 0 and it looked like this. i could see dudes running around. cool bug| joe wintergreen internet zone
this is my favourite kind of spider because it visibly goes on adventures and this i feel is a very good example of that. you can see the thought process. she is vibing if you watch for a while you will see her see a leaf standing on end like a tower and be like […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I’ve written before about – even though I’m a huge longtime Remedy enjoyer – not liking Control very much, but wanting to like it. Well, good news! After years of trying to like it, I finally like it. Here I will share with you the secrets, for there are several, to Liking Control If You […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
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 recent Metal Gear Solid 3 remake uses a lot of Quixel Megascans (a mostly-free library of ultra-high-fidelity photogrammetry), which I don’t think matters at all in itself, but it’s funny that the bit of wood Snake bites down on when he splints his elbow is 100% identical to a plank you roll over all […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
As my Ass Creed quest continues, I’ve now played through 1, 2, Brotherhood, Revelations, 3, 4 (Black Flag), and Unity, the whole “Desmond Trilogy” and then some. Here are some thoughts about each of those! Playing them in quick succession like this feels like overhearing an argument – someone wants it to be about this, […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
Mark asked: Hi Joe! We recently released our game on Steam and we’re having trouble getting Steam Deck verified. We’ve around the same number of Steam reviews and so I wanted to ask and see what steps you took to get over this hurdle as the game should at minimum hit Yellow verification, which would […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I’m on a bit of an Assassin’s Creed odyssey lately (not playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just on an odyssey through Assassin’s Creed), going in a weird order – I’ve just completed the first game a few days after completing Unity, which is sort of the last one that’s on the same train of thought as […]| 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
When it comes to the Steam Deck, InFlux Redux is now verified, thanks to an update I put out a few weeks ago and then several smaller updates over a few more weeks where I tweaked the size of text on various UI elements to be one pixel larger. Here’s an incomplete list of changes […]| 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
So you’re hiring for a technical role, and you end up comparing two people. One of them, let’s call them the Layperson, doesn’t have all that much relevant expertise, but comes across as thoughtful, organised, articulate and cooperative. The other one, let’s call them the Genius, seems to be the cream of the crop as […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
So I put a little message on there like: “hey if you torrent this and like it i’d appreciate it if you bought it if you can”, and a bunch of pirates went and bought it on itch, and some of ’em even tipped more than the price of the game. it was a $10 […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
It’s true and weird that while both Half-Life games are considered influential and important, hardly any of what was uniquely compelling about them made it into anything else. It’s still hard to find anything that feels like it does what they did: dynamically-chatty bit-part characters with interesting behaviours, NPC classes with specific attitudes to each […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
I’ve been messing around in the aforementioned Scythe level editing tool for UE5, here’s some of what I’ve been doin’| joe wintergreen internet zone
I don’t love Max Payne 3, but one thing is very good in it: it’s the only thing I’ve seen go out of its way to make player-activated bullet-time work in multiplayer non-jankily. It takes a pretty cool approach, where slow motion gets propagated between players and objects based on line of sight to the […]| 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
Hammer, king of level editors, has a view mode where the scene is unlit, but not fullbright; it’s shaded to make it easier to parse. Unreal doesn’t have that! But you can add it yourself, really easily, with no C++ or Blueprint – just a postprocess material and a line in a config file. Here’s […]| 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
Back in 2016, I was idly going through HL2’s source code and started tweeting interesting tidbits; this interested people a lot and PC Gamer made an article out of it. Twitter’s ruined, so I’m gonna put those tweets here now, and maybe elaborate on some of it. Come with me now on a journey through […]| 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
Been replaying Alan Wake 2 a bit, having charged through it at launch too quickly, and forever there is a Remedy game thought percolating in my head, and today it’s that Remedy characters talk explicitly about their feelings, which, while the post title is a joke, does give Max a level of self-examination most dudes […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
some asshole asked: How do you feel about abstraction vs models for game mechanics? e.g. having a realistic system for aiming a shot vs “roll to hit” It’s pretty situational I guess, but I usually enjoy things less the more abstracted or board-game-rulesy they are, especially in a real-time context. But the less that stuff […]| 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
so i was working on a game. the game has haystacks sometimes. if you set fire to the haystack, there’s a one in six chance that when it burns away, it turns out to contain a treasure chest! you can get some loot i implement this. much later, QA reports a bug: the chance of […]| 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
some canon new Star Wars thing should address midichlorians by acknowledging them as a whole-cloth pseudoscience and gatekeeping device. qui-gon has the right kind of dadvibe to have honestly believed in it. if there’s a reestablished jedi order or whatever they should view midichlorians the way we view, like, physiognomy. the only people who still […]| 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
On Twitter once I did a big thread where I went through Half-Life Alyx’s SDK – so this is Source 2 – and had a big ol’ yarn about ’em. That thread turned into a useful resource for some folks, so I made it a Cohost post, and now Cohost is going away so here […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
i had a gastroscopy recently and one of the milder things they were checking for just in case is a totally normal stomach bacteria called “helicobacter” which, when i looked it up, i found out he is a little guy with little flagella that he uses to dig into your stomach lining so he doesn’t […]| 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
the inferior sequel to the spectacular video game Interstate ’76. Got ’em off the install disc. Great concept art, not a great game. Interstate ’76 came out in 1997, alternate history ’76, Mechwarrior 2 engine, great story, great characters, great car physics, it’s got a poetry button, you can shoot a pistol out the window […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
(gravis did a comment on my FEAR post so long he made it a post, and now I’m doing that with that post, and this ends up being about all kinds of things) Half-Life 2 (and maybe 1, but I don’t think so?) had a trigger type called trigger_look, which was like a regular trigger, […]| joe wintergreen internet zone
The video game called F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon gets a bum rap, even though everyone knows it rules. The bum rap is that everyone thinks it’s just the AI and the guyshoot that rule in F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon, when actually a ton else about F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon also rules. You’re […]| 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
damn| joe wintergreen internet zone
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:| joe wintergreen internet zone
observed a spider today| www.joewintergreen.com
Back in 2021 I made a mod for Deus Ex 1 that fixes the lipsyncing and blinking, which, I betcha didn’t know, was broken since ship. Everything I wrote about it is on Twitter, and it oughta be somewhere else, so here’s a post about it. The mod itself can be downloaded here.| joe wintergreen internet zone
