Interactive GLSL - Lighting
-2018.3.5 4:30pm
In this section, we'll mostly talk about lighting! I'm not much of a math person and I'll do my best not to botch terms, but that means I'll be talking mostly about visual results rather than in equations! So those of you who are also not math people may enjoy this :)
If you haven't read part one, be sure to do that first! I'll be assuming you know a bit about shader syntax and what's going on.
Interactive GLSL - Shader Introduction
-2018.2.26 7:00pm
Shaders are easily one of my favorite parts of game development! I could spend all day writing little shader programs that do various different effects, and I could probably spend just as much time staring at the results! Shaders are delightful. But some people seem to think they're ominous black boxes!
It's true that shaders are pretty opaque up front! What do all these extra words mean, why is the syntax so strange, where does the data come from, what on earth is going on here?? Diving in headfirst can be confusing.
Blended Normals, or Soft Flat Shading
-2017.12.15 7:00pm
Flat shading's harsh edges and flat colors have never been something I find visually appealing, but I always feel like there's something nice still hidden in there! Well, I finally found a way to soften the harshness of it all, and I really, really love the results!
The key is blended normals! Take flat shading normals, and blend them with the usual vertex normals! This will preserve the hard edges created by the flat shading, but also add in some of the smoothness of traditional gouraud! Add in some sliders for tweaking, and you have yourself a beautiful retro/modern hybrid approach to lighting.
Making Callisto's Wind
-2017.7.18 3:00pm
In Callisto, I needed to add some motion to the scene, some visual activity to make the place seem alive! Since it's technically a fairly barren ice moon, with more snow than life, it made sense to add something to make it look windier.
I quickly settled on a cartoonish looking wind swirl, which you can see above! It looks cool, it's easily recognizable, and it's super easy to implement quickly! I didn't even need to write a custom shader for this, as it's accomplished entirely through scrolling the UVs on the material.
Progress Update on Plains of Callisto
-2017.7.3 4:00pm
That's the name of Game #1! Last week I spent working on the first seven days of the project, and it felt amazing! It's a relatively straightforward top-down mobile shooter, and it takes place on the moon of Callisto, orbiting Jupiter. I've done a game very similar to this already, which is one of the reasons I chose it. I wanted something easy so I could test out my workflow, focus on my priorities, and just get a feel for what the rest of the project would look like!
I quickly figured out it would be a bit of a time squeeze to get it done in a week. While I had a basic playable game done in the first 4 hours, (yay tools!) I soon was sucked into fixing bugs and adding cruial features to some of my newer, less tested tools (yay tools?). Also, about 1/3 of my week was spent working on UI as well, definitely way more than I wanted!
Keep updated!
Games! Tools! Tutorials! Don't miss anything, and feel free to drop me a note, I'd love to hear from you!
