Flan's Blog

I've been getting a lot of extra free time now I'm not commuting every day, and I have been spending an awful lot of it playing Minecraft. I'm running a medium-size custom-built modpack with 2 of my housemates, and while looking at other modpacks I was tempted by the idea of making my own quest mod to guide progress and ease the gathering of some of the more obtuse mob drops. Picking up Minecraft Forge again felt so familiar, and creating a mod from scratch was incredibly satisfying. Every time I've popped back previously, it has been in response to people asking for Flan's Mod updates, and updating is never a fun experience. Forge is really well designed to get you making what you want to make very quickly and takes away a lot of faff. Not all of the faff, mind you, and I don't even want to talk about the .json blockstate system. Day 1 was re-learning the tools and making strange box-people. The mod has come together in two days, just about. I can't

Getting a Unity project from the jam phase into something more long-lived is really tough and I've been struggling to motivate myself to make progress recently. There are fairly obvious holes in the foundation of the game that I know I should fill first; ship controls, interaction code and all that. Today though, I wanted to make something shiny; a distinct visual upgrade over the janky modelling tools I've been using so far. I had opened Blender on Friday and made some first steps with the sculpting tools, so I already had this lumpy crocodile head as a placeholder to work with. The first experiment this morning was into using bones to stretch a mesh to allow character customisation. I learnt a lot about bones, implemented this random body changer, and then realised that there were much better tools for the job. Following a tutorial from Minions Art  I learnt about Blender's blend shapes and shrinkwrap. There's a lot to digest here, but from what I

This week has been focused on improving O Captain and then trying to bring it back to 100% demo functionality in order to share a Post-Jam version. Improvements have gone well, we now have a separate interior and exterior world with portals between them (as explained in previous blogpost) and I've snazzified the ship interior and exterior with AssetForge. Functionality is coming back online slowly, but there are a handful of things that don't work immediately with the new portal tech, so I'm hoping to wrap things up on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy this gif of the new interior and a picture of the exterior.

Following on from "O Captain! My Captain!" that I made for Ludum Dare 46, I've been hard at work pulling the project apart, refactoring the code and experimenting with new concepts. On the art side, I've been getting into AssetForge, a kit bash tool with a few hundred assets in it, which is a definite improvement over Blocks. I'm still trying it out and am always on the lookout for other one-step-above-programmer-art tools. In terms of code, there's a big problem with O Captain jam edition, and vehicle games in general, in that most game engines are built for fixed size levels of about +/-2000m in each dimension. This is due to the limited precision of floating-point numbers, where the difference between 0.001 and 0.002 (which could be relevant when making a model of a control panel) gets completely swamped when added to your ship's position at +4000 units. This causes textures to jitter and at extreme lengths can start making player movement jittery

Last weekend was Ludum Dare weekend and so I was busy making a game once again. Ludum Dare is one of the world's biggest game jams that now runs twice a year and which I have been taking part in for the past 8 years or so.  We had a great theme this year of "Keep It Alive". I'd had an idea in the back of my mind for a while about making a space pirate game and decided to have a go at it, with the ship being your sentient AI friend you have to keep alive. Judging by the other entries, I don't think I was alone in taking an idea and adapting it to the theme; there is such a wide variety of entries this time around! So the game that I made, with my partner Lucy doing the voice-acting and some of the VR modelling, is called "O Captain! My Captain!" and features you and RobinOS flying around a (very small) asteroid belt completing missions. Please give it a go and let me know if you like it! If you entered a game into the jam too, let me k

Hello again everyone! I've been toying with all sorts of things this week to try and pin down my tool chain and lay some groundwork for future projects. I've used Google Blocks VR for modelling in loads of gamejams and to a very minor extent in Minimancer. I love it, it lets people without the know-how to use Max, Maya or Blender to start creating models very quickly. The trade off is the cap on complexity and simplistic style, but I actually quite enjoy those limitations. It reminds me of working on Minecraft icons and working details into that 16x16 sprite. The exported .obj models from Blocks are really easy to use but, while jamming on BeetHoven, I started to experiment with custom materials and shaders. While fun, the massive pitfall I happened into while doing this was that I had no way to automatically apply those materials, and so I ended up dragging and dropping a material onto every bit of every model. Oof. So last Thursday I put together a custom model importer, uv