"Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment."
- Jeff Bezos

Charlie Munger: "We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right, is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire."

Learning Shaders Day 12: After a 2 week break to learn Unreal, I'm back learning shaders!
Do you like this glowing rock? Combined with endless falling shader, tweaked from shaderoo.org/?shader...

Course: www.udemy.com/share/...

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #Shaders #TechArt #LearningInPublic

Gamedev Coworking in Austin - unityco.work Welcome to UnityCo.work, a coworking group for gamedevs in Austin.  We meet most weeks at the Capital Factory’s open day to code, collaborate, and support each other’s projects. We use Unity - but all game creatives are welcome! 😃

Another great day of #GameDev coworking at Capital Factory downtown Austin yesterday.

This week saw Derrius, Alex, yours truly, and Walter working on everything from single-device co-op, thru competitive mobile games to a fresh Asteroids concept.

Join us next Tuesday 👉

🌍 God Complex: Iteration 29 COMPLETE 🌍

Followers now actually fight instead of staring awkwardly.
They can also attack houses, and little defenders come out to defend!

Progress, violence, and choreography, in that order.

#GodComplexGame #MadeWithUnity #IndieGame #Gamedev

Learning Shaders Day 11: Rounded off the section on textures with some cool blending and ripple effects. Not sure where I'll use this ripple, but it's pretty! Can see the blend coming in handy.

Course: www.udemy.com/share/...

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #Shaders #TechArt #LearningInPublic

🌍 MAJOR GOD COMPLEX UPDATE 🌍 ECS combat is working! ⚔️
Followers are now almost fully converted to DOTS/ECS.
Just need to get house invasion back up and running - oh, and the network animation sync, and then we should be good to go.

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #ECS #GodComplexGame

Learning Shaders Day 10: Messing around with textures
Do you know about shadertoy.com? I spiced up the background with inspiration from www.shadertoy.com/vi...

Course: www.udemy.com/share/...

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #Shaders #TechArt #LearningInPublic

Sounds good. Ping me for sure when you have an update!

That's it; eventually, yes. I'm rolling up an alpha with just flooding and land manipulation, that represents the minimal game.

Would be nice to see a prototype of your game with block graphics - sounds like you could test the gameplay early on and I'm sure people would play it. I know I would.

It's a very different scenario. God Complex is real-time, and you only get to manipulate the environment. So you create floods, or move land that affects the population - but you don't control them directly.
I imagine with your concept, balance is everything. Do you have a prototype?

Learning Shaders Day 9: Today I learned:
· how to make a simple wood surface shader
· the difference between surface and volumetric shaders
· there's tons of shader stuff on GitHub to copy & tweak!

Course: www.udemy.com/share/...

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #Shaders #TechArt #LearningInPublic

Ooh! I missed this reply yesterday. That sounds intriguing. What do you mean battling with effects?
One of the key tenets of my game is you manipulate the environment but never the little people directly, so I'm interested in how you might do this.

Tried Godot back when Unity set itself on fire. Love that it's open source. Recently, I met an experienced VFX artist. He switched from Unity -> Godot, and was knocking out impressive effects with tiny shader code!
Still, UE always feels like it's in a different league in terms of graphic fidelity.

That's what's cool with shaders, it's definitely the crossover point.
I've built up so much code at this point, I feel married to Unity! That said, I'm often tempted by (and envious of) the UE sheen and was tempted to switch a few times. Maybe one day!

Love both those games. I spent many a coin on Crystal Castles in particular, in my youth! I liked the trackball.

Yeah, I'm having fun with it for sure. My background is coding; I didn't do any of the art or the shaders in the current game. They were all the creative output of my daughter, Valerie, who just started art school in the fall.

Crystal Castles (Arcade Trackball Game) Mike Matei Live YouTube video by Cinemassacre Clips

Very cool - it's giving me Crystal Castle vibes
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsRu...

That's neat! Are you using a tool to help with the level layout?

Anything you can share?

Nice! I like your approach. I'll tackle the next lesson with this in mind. Thanks for taking the time to share it.
Where are you going with your pixelart? Do you have a game idea in mind, or something else?

Sounds good. I’m curious

Learning Shaders Day 8
This is pretty, but the course is losing me a bit. I get why it works, but couldn't make it from scratch. Maybe that's the point? You end up with a library of stuff to copy/paste.

Course: www.udemy.com/share/...

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #Shaders #TechArt #LearningInPublic

Learning Shaders Day 7
The last Shaping Functions lesson. You create a wall. Not as visually appealing as some (yesterday's radar was my favorite) but I can see this is extremely useful. Probably.

Course: www.udemy.com/share/...

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #Shaders #TechArt #LearningInPublic

It's a good course. Can get mathy quickly - probably best if you've got some decent coding experience.

Learning Shaders Day 6
Things are getting v. interesting. Can't say I understood all this - the gist is you use fmod and clamp to create gradients. I also learned debugging cg shader code is difficult!

Course: www.udemy.com/share/...

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #Shaders #TechArt #LearningInPublic

🌍GOD COMPLEX 🌍A quick test with 2,000 followers.
The real game will have fewer - more like around 100 per god, with 6 gods total.
Still, cool to see what DOTS/ECS can let us do.

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #DOTS #ECS #GodComplexGame

Are you too knee deep in logging to know what the heck is happening?
I had Console Pro for ages but just found its real strength: you can color log search results and filter them out. Let's you cut to the chase.
Never debug without it!

assetstore.unity.com...

#Unity3D #GameDev #IndieDev #Tools

🌍 God Complex: Iteration 28 COMPLETE 🌍
Followers are wandering again! 🎉
More efficient, more confused, and there are more of them.
They also now know their god’s territory (mostly).
Combat’s next up for conversion to DOTS/ECS.

#GodComplexGame #MadeWithUnity #gamedev #indiedev

Learning Shaders Day 5
Covered quite a few more geometric shapes, today, including an exercise in drawing sine waves.
That was cool, but these expanding squares were the most visually appealing.

Course: www.udemy.com/share/...

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity3D #Shaders #TechArt #LearningInPublic