Game Dev

The Palladian grammar

A parametric shape grammar that generates the ground plans of Palladio's villas is developed as a definition of the Palladian style. The grammar is applied to generate the plan for the Villa Malcontenta.

I/O systems for level scripting – joe wintergreen internet zone

This week I built a Source Engine style input/output (I/O) system for level scripting in Sleight of Hand, and if you don’t know what that is or means, you have that in common with most game developers. It’s an astonishingly useful thing to have on any game with level scripting (it’s how Valve’s games do it all the way from Half-Life to Half-Life Alyx). It’s empowering to level designers, and the time and work it stands to save you is unquantifiable but immense. It’s also simple and easy! I’m gonna jot down here how mine (in Unreal) works, but also make a case for the feature in the first place, because like all the most impactful good ideas, most people don’t see the point right away. Alas, I fear I will have to use headings.

contextual animation stuff in Sleight of Hand

I’ve been working for the last week or two on a system to streamline contextual or scripted animation stuff in Sleight of Hand, a stealth game with a lot of systemic interaction aspirations. I built an interest source system a while back for coordinated investigations and dynamic behaviours, and while some of those interactions have been doing cool stuff on the animation side (a guy might rip open a wardrobe you’re hiding in, for example), it has tended to involve a lot of more-or-less-boilerplate Blueprint every time; it’s not been as easy as it should be to drop in what Half-Life called a “scripted sequence”. This fortnight’s work has improved this a great deal, and I’ll tell you for why, and perhaps you will benefit from doing something like this yourself.

Wayback Machine

Styled Nodes in Unreal Engine

I showcase how you can style a collection of Unreal Engine nodes

Exploring Rectangle Subdivisions

Last week, I saw a talk on Vuntra City, a procedurally generated city with a fully explorable city. Developer Larissa Davidova explained that she settled on using Recursive Subdivision for the city…

Mapgen4 trade routes

Last time I talked about de-optimizing mapgen4 so that I could more easily create experiments. I wanted to share one of those experiments. I recently assembled some of my existing ingredients into something that was just plain fun to watch, and I wanted to share this simulation of traders moving around a map: