Tag: Game Development

  • Making a Vector Game Engine with an Oscilloscope

    A couple of weeks ago I started work on a new video game engine for vector displays. For a long time I have been enamoured by the uniquely high contrast of vector displays. A local bar named House of Targ hosted an original Asteroids arcade cabinet that only could be appreciated in-person: the super bright…

  • Disabling Frustum Culling on a Game Object in Unity

    You should never disable frustum culling in a release build. But sometimes it can be useful to do so for debugging or when dealing with a really wacky vertex shader where mesh bounds don’t make sense anymore. Here’s an easy way to disable frustum culling on a game object by moving its bounds into the…

  • Visualising the OpenGL 3D Transform Pipeline Using Unity

    Download Download Unity package Transcript “Hi, I’m Allen Pestaluky. I’m going to go over a simple tool that I’ve made in Unity that visualizes the 3D transform pipeline in OpenGL. You can download it and find the transcript of this video on my blog at allenwp.com or via the link in the video description. This…

  • Two Game Messaging Systems using Observer and Visitor Patterns

    Maximum output for minimum input. …That’s the idea behind Juicifying Your Game. But this can lead to some pretty messy code if you start injecting extra code at every event that happens in your game. This is where messaging/event systems come in handy to ensure that every component of the game is given an opportunity…

  • Successful Game Jamming

    At a recent Dirty Rectangles Show and Tell, I took part in a two hour game jam. This was the second game jam that I’ve taken part in, but I have attended many over the last few years. I’ve seen a lot of successes and failures and made a number of mistakes myself, but this…

  • IGDA Ottawa: Indies in the Classroom Talk

    At a recent Independent Game Developers Association meeting I was asked to talk about my experiences taking Hideout!, a project originally developed as schoolwork, to the Xbox 360 for public sale. The slides and a video of the presentation are below. As always, please pass on any feedback; it’s always much appreciated! The presentation began…

  • Changing the Windows Mouse Cursor in XNA

    Background For anyone who is looking to develop a mouse-based game for Windows using the XNA framework, it’s pretty critical to be able to change your mouse cursor in game. The first method is to hide the mouse cursor and draw a custom texture in place of it – but anyone who is developing a…

  • Hideout! Post-mortem / Retrospective

    It’s been a few moths since the Xbox 360 release of Hideout! on the Indie Games channel of Xbox Live. The sales were very low, but I was expecting that from this type of game. Regardless, with over 1200 trial downloads and only 45 sales, it would be good to look at why this game…

  • Hideout!: Designing Lasting Arcade-Style Gameplay

    When I initially designed and implemented the gameplay of Hideout! I had created a game where the best players would consistently get to about level 5 or 6, while beginners would typically achieve level 3 or 4. This wasn’t very good – I wanted experienced players to be able to get much higher up, maybe…

  • 720p Title Safe GUI Template

    I am currently in the process of porting Hideout! to the Xbox 360 with XNA. As a part of this process, I needed to create a Photoshop GUI template for my GUI artist to ensure that our game would work well on all TVs. I thought this template may be useful to other developers as…

  • Simple, fast, GPU-driven multi-textured terrain

    In this article, I will be outlining the method of multi-textured terrain that I used in my recently completed XNA Real Time Strategy (RTS) project, Toy Factory. I have also expanded this tutorial to cover organic (blended) and deformed terrain. This method enables you to produce a similar result to Riemer’s XNA Tutorial on Multitexturing,…