In the FPS roguelike I’ve been working on, a core feature is that each ability modifies how you interact with the world – you see things differently, you move differently, etc. Night Vision I’m working on a tiny level demo to show some of my ideas together. I want one […]
A lot of us have been looking at alternative engines recently, and for me the biggest challenge is that the intersection between “game engine I can use easily” and “programming language I am willing to use” is quite small. That got me thinking: if you started a new commercial ES […]
I love researching and writing about Entity Systems, but it takes me days or weeks to make a single article. I’ve written almost nothing for the past 18 months because on my current salary I can’t afford the time off work. So … now I’m crowdfunding the long, detailed, in-depth […]
Civilization was one of the best games ever designed and shipped. Civ5 is tragic. It’s one thing to launch a AAA title full of nerfed gameplay and obvious, in-your-face bugs, but quite another to leave them unfixed for years after. It’s one thing to officially fix your bugs only in […]
I periodically write massive long documents detailing all the bugs in Unity that I know, have memorized, and have to workaround on a day-to-day / hour-to-hour basis. But it makes me so angry and frustrated – so much terrible coding, so little technology-leadership at the company – that I end […]
There’s only a few tag-cloud plugins that still work – most of them have stopped being supported. The best one I found has super-awesome-multi-colour mode. But by default it’s disabled, and the config-options don’t include a way to turn it on. You have to dig in the developer documentation to […]
A new version of Unity is now out – https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.2 – and it’s a doozy. I don’t normally blog a blow-by-blow account, but this set is particularly interesting. It suggests the tech team has been focussed on fixing many “critical but un-sexy” problems. That is a noticeable change in direction […]
There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the flaws (most people don’t want to write bad things. Screw that; ignoring the bad points […]
Unity3D has a great core architecture – it’s easy to understand and use. However, it has some significant flaws. One of the recurring problems I run into is that Unity requirs you to have precisely one “Scene” at any one time, but often you need to have multiple scenes at […]
One of my hobby projects is a testament to the Ultima and Elder Scrolls games – a massive open-world, where everything you do impacts the world around you. This has long been promised by commercial games – and it sucks from a gameplay perspective; it’s just not fun. But a […]
One of Unity’s dirty secrets is that (out of the box) it’s plain awful as a prototyping tool. You can fix that, but it requires quite a lot of work. I’m going to start publishing my fixes one by one. Here’s the first: a test-bed for making custom meshes.
If you do any non-trivial customization of Unity Editor, you’ll almost certainly extend EditorWindow. But Unity (to date) refuses to tell anyone how to do this legally, or what the contracts you’re being held to are. Without that, many plugins on the Unity Asset Store are wrong and buggy, and […]
How do you make good UX / GUI to present information to a mass-market audience with widely varying levels of education and attention-span? This is a problem faced all the time by game designers and developers. It’s one of the most under-appreciated skills of the profession: good game developers know […]
In Unity, you create new scripts many times per day, and folders but there’s no keyboard shortcuts. I fixed this, and made the popup rather more intelligent than Unity’s built-in one. I’ve decided to make the basic version available for free here: UPDATE: there’s a bug in the 1.0 version […]
This has come up a few times, and I ended up replying on Twitter: @t_machine_org any thoughts of using 128bit guids for entity-ids? too big? — Richard Kogelnig (@RichardKogelnig) June 9, 2015 But that’s a crappy way to find things later, so I made a quick-and-dirty infographic with a few […]
Six months ago I tweeted a handful of obvious ways that you could make the Unity Asset Store greatly more profitable. One of the Unity folk reached out to me, claimed that Unity was highly invested in improving this and asked for specific suggestions. So I wrote longer, detailed versions […]
Experimenting with shorter Entity Systems articles This post is an experiment: rather than write massive, heavily-edited articles, I’m writing “shallow” versions first, which takes me only an hour or so. Then I’m saving the in-depth, detailed versions of each topic for future subscribers to my own Unity3D Entity System. This […]
Slides from my talk last night at Unity Brighton. Three parts: First: introduction / overview of Entity Systems, and why you care (as a “person who makes games”) Second: Progress so far: screenshots of the Unity Editor with explanation of the new features I’ve added Third: Challenges and solutions I’ve […]
Recap: previous posts on Unity3D and designing an efficient Entity Systems add-on library, using structs to store data in C#. But …