#85 – September 4, 2022
The Arm developers recently migrated their project from the Built-in Render Pipeline to the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and decided to share your experience with the community.
VFX in Returnal: Can we do it with particles?
In a keynote from GDC 2022, Risto Jankkila and Sharman Jagadisan of Housemarque and Playstation Studios discuss how the studio has used its programmable particle system to create key visual effects features in Returnal. Covers volumetric fog, real-time fluid simulation, and the use of particle hierarchies for tentacle-like character effects.
Architecture in Video Games: How Buildings Affect Level Design
Vladimir Semykin, especially for Manzhet, studied how games use architecture to organize the game space and immerse the game world.
Using Exoscript to tame the “narrative octopus” from I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
Like a homemade scripting language Exoscript helped develop flexible storytelling in the open world, consisting of almost 600 thousand words.
An Extraordinary Lesson in Godot 4.0: Pixels and RPGs
Part one, in which the little man learned to walk.
Dreamscaper: killer action game with an indie budget
In a GDC 2022 keynote, Ian Coffino of Afterburner Studios walks through the process of creating a combat system in a small, independent team, focusing on the design, feel, and workflow required to succeed.
3 storytelling lessons from Inscryption
Inscryption launched in 2021 to critical acclaim, winning top prizes at the Independent Games Festival, among other things. To celebrate the launch of the game on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, the Unity team remembers this year’s Game Developers Conference, where Daniel Mullins of Daniel Mullins Games joined Unity’s Osama Dorias to discuss storytelling.
Setting up the volumetric fog effect in Unity
Harry Alisavakis shared a detailed tutorial on how to create the Volumetric Fog post-processing effect.
Flutter Flame: 32 times faster collision handling
Flame implements the concept of active and passive objects to improve performance: active objects collide with passive objects and with each other. Collisions between passive objects are not calculated at all, but you can always change the object type. This small detail eliminates a significant number of objects from both phases of collision detection, which, compared to Bonfire, gives a serious performance boost.
But it can be even faster.
Latent Pressure PowerWash Simulator
FuturLab founder and CEO James Marsden discusses the game’s origins, coming out of Sony’s shadow, and the difficulty of finding a publisher.
How to Create Dialogue Sound Like Celeste and Animal Crossing Using Unity
The video shows how to use Unity to create a dialogue sound effect similar to that used in Celeste and Animal Crossing.
It covers creating a universal playback system, ensuring sound predictability for a given line of dialogue, and considering different sound configurations to support multiple speakers.
Reimagining a 10-year-old UE4 demo in Unreal Engine 5
Visual effects artist Dylan Brown explainedhow the UE4 demo was reimagined with Unreal Engine 5, talked about setting up shaders for the project and shared some information about porting old projects to UE5.
Redefining the Limits: Working with Light in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart
In a session with GDC 2022, Anna Roan and Brian Mullen of Insomniac Games talk about setup, challenges and lessons learned, paving the way for next-gen coverage. In addition, it discusses how Marvel’s Spider-Man workflows and pipeline were implemented to work on this project, and how they have adapted throughout the project to create a truly fantastic visual for the PlayStation 5.
Why go to porting studios: an interview with the co-founder of Samustai
Anton Vinogradov tells about your company — what exactly porting studios do, what difficulties arise in the process, and why outsourcing in this business can be more profitable than do-it-yourself porting.
Creating an outline as post-processing in Unity
The video tutorial explains how to implement the effect in Unity, shows how to detect edges using the depth buffer.
Additionally, it shows how to set up the effect so that objects behind other objects receive a separate see through wall effect.
“Kickstarter has been our most valuable marketing tool”: backpack hero developer again
In an episode of the IndieGameBusiness podcast, Jasper Cole, developer of Backpack Hero, tells how to run an effective Kickstarter campaign. His campaign was a great success: he hit his $20,000 goal, raising $200,000 in total.
Creating games for CD-i in 2022
Developer Jeffrey Janssen explainswhy he only makes games for the discontinued and often derided Phillips multimedia platform.
An easy way to model clothes in Blender
Jan van den Hemel told on how to create clothing meshes using simple modeling techniques.
Getting Started with Unity with OpenXR
Time goes by, technology does not stand still, and there are more and more ways to develop your VR project. OpenXR allows you to take full control of your VR project and painlessly transfer your game to virtual reality.
Automated testing and validation of lod changes through supervised learning
Two methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) are presented, which can detect LOD transitions and the quality of that transition.
Discusses the issue with current approaches and how the techniques presented can be used to support artists.
Journey to Nanite by Brian Caris of Epic Games
The talk discusses the challenges artists face and how Nanite can help. A large number of topics are presented that Brian explored along the way.
It discusses how to structure long-term research, focusing on problems in this area.
Miscellaneous
Realistic version of LoFi Girl created in Blender and UE5
The project was created about 6 months ago, when UE5 was in beta, but the project files then got corrupted and only the final render remained.
Used Metahumans, Substance Painter, Blender, Unreal Engine 5 and Megascans.
Another cute animation made in Blender
From Twitter.
Rain created in Blender using geometry nodes
From Twitter.
The final part of the documentary about Arcane has been released
It tells about the last stages of production of the series.
Interesting combat animations in the game in anime style
From Twitter.
If you want to support the release of the digest and other materials, you can do this in one of the ways.
