Unity

While I was working on Inner Alliance, I needed to implement a fog of war but I realized a simple 2D screen effect wouldn’t cut it when we had a dynamic 3D camera. That led me down the path of raymarched fog. Here, we’ll take a look at how I built it in Unity URP. Intro to Ray Marching Raymarching is a powerful rendering technique that casts rays from the camera and steps along them to sample shapes or volumes. Instead of relying on complex meshes, it uses signed distance functions (SDFs) to represent objects like spheres, fog, or clouds. ...

Inner Alliance Inner Alliance is a tabletop turn-based tactical rescue game where players lead a team of specialists through a flooded environment in a top-down, XCOM-style format. Beyond promoting strategy and teamwork, it serves as an educational tool to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within military organizations. By leveraging interactive media, the game engages players in complex decision-making, emphasizing the importance of inclusive collaboration in high-stakes scenarios. I joined the project through the Archipelago of Design to transform the board game into a video game, taking on the full scope of programming. The team later grew to include talented designers and artists, enhancing the project’s development, which remains ongoing with promising progress. ...

Lucid Dream | 20-day TapTap Game Jam 2024 unity Unity C# ...

Managing inputs in Unity can quickly become unwieldy, especially when dealing with multiple devices and input schemes. This guide explores a modular approach using ScriptableObjects to manage device-specific icons, decouple input events, and enable dependency injection for flexibility. Goals Ease of Management: Simplify handling device-specific input icons. Decoupling: Avoid relying on a centralized input manager. Flexibility: Use ScriptableObjects for modular and reusable input definitions. Drawbacks InputActionDefinition OnInput returns a CallbackContext that can have any information Subscribers have to assume the CallbackContext has the info they need (ex. a Vector2) Steps Follow these steps to implement this architecture: ...

During a game jam centered around the theme of light, I worked on a project that required a shadow detection system. You can check out the game here. The challenge was to detect when objects were in light or shadow and identify the closest shadow to an object. Initially, I thought render textures would be an elegant solution, but this approach turned out to be a mistake. Here’s why. The Initial Appeal of Render Textures The idea was to use a camera positioned above the scene to capture light and shadow data into a render texture. This texture could then be sampled to determine if an object was in shadow or to find the nearest shadow by analyzing surrounding pixels. It seemed promising because it provided a dynamic map of the environment, avoiding the performance cost of casting multiple rays while also letting us easily find the closest shadow. ...

Trailer created with Blender by me Slime Hunter Slime Hunter is a 3D Top-Down Action RPG set in the fantasy world of Slimeria, where players hunt cute and dangerous slimes. Featuring comprehensive combat, spell, and inventory systems, diverse enemies, and a beautifully hand-built environment. Slimeria is a fantasy world where Slimes are the primary fauna alongside humans. For mysterious reasons, the slime population has grown significantly while more dangerous breeds wreaking havoc on local towns. You play a lone slime hunter, making their journey through Slimeria to learn about the state of the slime invasion and hopefully find the source. ...

What is Responsive Combat Whether it’s an attack, dodge, or block, responsive combat ensures each feels immediate and with appropriate feedback. Games like Hades got this nailed down to a tee. Attacks feel punchy with minimal delay and the player rarely feels like their fighting with the controls to get the game to do what they want. By providing precise control over the character’s abilities, responsive combat enhances the sense of agency and satisfaction, leading to more intense and rewarding gameplay experiences. ...

I’m documenting some of my adventures looking into the Scriptable Render Pipelines in Unity. I have the goal of creating a stylized 3D pixel-art render pipeline heavily inspired by t3ssel8r. What is URP Cel-Shading Rendering To an Intermediate Texture During rendering passes, it’s common to store information by rendering to a texture instead of immediately rendering to the screen. For example, if you want to just do a pass to collect depth information, you can draw that information in memory and hold on to it to reference for later usage. You probably wouldn’t want to draw normals on the screen directly and mess with the rest of your render passes. ...

While trying to import a plane from Blender to Unity, I ran into the issue of the normals facing the wrong direction once imported into Unity. This was particularly an issue when it came to vertex shaders as any vertex transform performed incorrectly. This crux of the issue is that Blender considers the z-axis to be the vertical axis while unity considers the y-axis to be. So, for a plane in Blender, the normals would face towards the positive z-axis but when imported to Unity, they remain so which to Unity is actually along the horizontal plane. Oddly, the actual model imports in the correct orientation, it’s just the normals that don’t adjust after import (which creates the mismatch problem of normals not facing the right direction. If the whole mesh and normals rotated equally, that’d be fine). ...

Shaders are programs used to describe how pixels should be arranged, colored, and transformed on the screen. The simple definition extends to so many applications especially in 3D graphics in movies and games. Every computer generated prop placed in a scene is carefully designed to look a certain way, all with the help of shaders. Shader’s make use of the GPU to constantly run concurrent calculation on every pixel and you can decide what those calculations do through programming with languages such as HLSL and GLSL. You can decide that very pixel should be moved slightly to the left, or that they should be slightly more saturated under certain conditions, or even that they have follow the movement of a sine curve and create waves like an animation. You might start to realize that there is a lot a math involved and there is. Specifically, the way you want to arrange pixels makes heavy use of linear algebra to orient points in space as well as creative calculus to take advantage of functions when wanting to create tailored movements and patterns. ...