Visitor in Visby

API Design and Best Practices is the programming course I’ve always wanted and every darn programming course should be exactly like it from now on oh my god! Studying to be a game developer, most of your classes will be focused on “make the thing work”. And don’t get me wrong, ‘making the thing work’ is a great paradigm if your game consists of 5 scripts written for a 2-week project. API Design is the first programming course that asks me to “make the thing airtight and self-reliant” and I love everything about it. In the past, I’ve fallen victim to the pitfall of writing unnecessary tools. My general rule of thumb nowadays is that they should only be created if they save time. After all, saving time is a tools primary purpose. Luckily, the Celestial Clock Tool has already paid back its time loss tenfold! Quick recap from last week: the tool lets me change the time of day inside the scene view. With this, I can quickly iterator over our day-night cycles. Making sure that golden hour lo...

As a community manager, I believe my biggest asset is realizing I’m still failing. Start this week our community was 6 large. Now, you have to understand I hold no animosity towards the number 6; in fact, for a couple of nobodies that have posted some random art in a couple of servers that didn’t ask for it, we’re doing pretty good! No, the real problem I have with the number 6 is that I have no idea how to increase it. Though my knowledge on the subject is lacking, thankfully the internet has plenty of tips, tricks, guides, tutorials and courses on how YOU can UNLOCK YOUR AWARENESS or some hogwash. This not being my first rodeo, I know to take any sales pitches and unrealistically positive advice with a grain of salt. That being said, taking out some company-time to fill up on fan-attraction knowledge was I believe the best thing I could’ve did! Brought to you by the same guy that made “1000 Fans in 90 Days”. I’m not kidding, that’s literally one of his other videos. Some of the infor...

After 5 days we’ve got 6 people who joined the discord. That aren’t talking to each other. Or interacting in any way whatsoever. The takeaway: we’re right on track for the 30-users mark! But boy there’s a real art to this community-stuff. I’m constantly questioning what I can and can’t write about the project, if I’m promoting the game to the right people (or am even allowed to), and if anyone even cares! Luckily I met some indie-fella last week whom I asked for guidance. He explained to me that, yes: you should post everything, and you should save everything you post so you can make callbacks to it later. They also told me to plaster my discord invites on any wall in every place, so that’s what I’m doin’. Last week I complained about lights for half of the post. This week is a lot more relaxed. I went through the rest of the course and finished it splendidly. There’s 3 main steps to lighting optimizing, which can be completed in any order (though they really should have started with t...

So what happened was, I started writing about this course I did on Unity realtime lighting… and I wouldn’t shut up about it. If you’re not a complete tech-nerd like me, you might want to skip the next part. If, however, you like torturing yourself with listening to the ramblings of an old fool (me) then I would advise you to seek help after reading my lighting rant. Remember this picture? Last week I was playing around with lights and making shadows look amazeballs. This week I focused on learning another aspect of the lighting process. You know how if you are standing in a dark room and you shine a flashlight on the wall you can see the whole room, not just the part you’re shining on? In Unity that process is called global illumination (GI). To illustrate: No bounce light = no red box. As you now understand, omitting GI in a game so focused on visuals is not gonna cut the cheese. Thankfully its baking process is not at all one laden with specificity that takes hours to optimize. For e...

Going away on exchange is something I can recommend to everyone. You'll learn that living in a foreign country isn't that scary, there's great friends to be made along the way and you can get some time away from the political dramas of the homeland. Most importantly, it's a free pass to escape your family! ...until they come to visit you that is. After Butter Burgh’s failure to find a motivated group of engineers (even though the concept was great) I felt no shame in joining Break It. Break It is a great concept by its own right; one that I helped shape a bit as well in its early stages. The concept of the game is that the world feels gray and dull, and in fact it will literally start out looking gray. As the game progresses, there are small interactions you can do to light up the world and make it more colorful. Note that the following images are all mockups and not representative of the final product. “When you start the game, everything is gray and sad.” “But openi...