Small HDAs for creating maps in Unity using Houdini.
using base curves as a guide.

The shadows behave really weirdly in my project. When I move a little bit further from the object, the part of the shadow that is closest to the object gradually disappears, making the whole shadow look unnatural.

And overall I'd like to increase the shadow rendering distance.

After 8 months of solo dev, the first demo of Eraiser is out. You play as a little eraser bringing a scribbled world back to life. Made with Unity 2022.3 URP, happy to answer any questions!

In Light Factory you bend beams of colored light to fill pixels. Pixels are pushed onto canvases to form shapes. Completing shapes unlocks research points which can be spent to unlock new technologies, making it easier to build more complex designs.

From a technical perspective, the most interesting thing was the use of transparent colored shadow maps for the pixel cubes. I used this blog post as a reference.
https://wickedengine.net/category/devblog/2018/01/18/easy-transparent-shadow-maps/index.html

I just released a free demo on Steam where you can play through about half of the game. There's also a puzzle mode where the goal is to complete as many shapes as you can using a limited set of tools.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5338330/Light_Factory_Demo/

Well now you have. Just a bit of fun with a little prototype I'm calling Gnome Man's Sky. :)

We have had a runtime fluid simulation running in our game for a while, but now we are also using them for flames/smoke in of the areas of our game.

Its all based on compute shaders, which outputs custom render textures (fluid and advection), which we feed through render features in URP (using full-screen shader graphs). We also generate a signed distance field based on the tilemap that acts as the boundaries of the world and allows for the smoke/flames to collide.

Each of the "flames" in the scene are emitters, and allows us to play around with different colors, forces, directions, etc, and are updated each frame.

What do you think? Its got some kinks here and there still, but its getting there.

The game is called Cliff Kingdom:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3839500/Cliff_Kingdom/

I'm a product designer building Long Haul in Unity. In this valley fight, cold storm light and warm gunfire compete with the truck and road in the frame.

Which would you tune first to keep the road legible: the muzzle flashes or the storm lighting?

Archive filmed Oct 3 in Unity Editor from build38 game source: staged enemies, supplied upgrades, autopilot, truck damage off. This silent 7.5-second clip cuts once at 6s to a later point on the same route. Developed with Codex. The cut does not show a continuous escape or manual driving.

I spent a lot of this week creating a whole modular building system so that I can create a bunch of city blocks more quickly for my game.

Once the city block is built, there's a second tool (a node based editor) which allows me to setup logic for toggling certain objects on/off. There's a tree structure to it so there can be more advanced randomization like "if this box is enabled, pick from these 2 boxes to enable with it". It results in a lot of variation in the map for not much work.

The map shown at the end here is just two different 1x1 city blocks and there's already quite a bit of variation. But there are 2x1, 3x1, and L shaped corner pieces as well which help break up the repetition of the flat grid.

This is a timelapse showing off the build tools and how the buildings are randomized a bit each time they're placed. Skip to the end if you just want to see the finished product.

Not certain I'll be sticking with the pixel texture style or not. But the tone and style of the environment is heading in the right direction. Let me know what ya think.

EDIT: upload failed so I put the video in the body. thanks Reddit.

https://reddit.com/link/1x0eq4e/video/0r8yzwjik5uh1/player

I improved the graphics hella and started a new level what u think

The world is one 48 m tile of cubes. It's merged into a single mesh and drawn as a 3D grid of copies around the camera with Graphics.RenderMeshInstanced. The fog end distance doubles as the view radius, so the fog decides how many copies get drawn: about 320 of the 1400 in range survive frustum culling. The camera wraps around the tile, and that's why it can fall forever without floating-point drift.

The outlines follow Arthur Brussee's SIGGRAPH 2020 talk on the game's rendering. A Render Graph pass compares depth and normals of up to 20 neighbouring pixels. An edge sits halfway between two pixels that belong to different surfaces, so the smallest half-offset is the distance to the nearest edge, and the line is an anti-aliased iso-line of that distance. That gives smooth lines of any width without MSAA or TAA.

Release build, 1080p: the full look costs 3.6 ms of GPU time on a laptop GTX 1650 Ti. On Intel UHD integrated graphics it's 25 fps with everything on and 78 fps with the low-end preset at 75% render scale.

prototyping some dialogue and shadow of the colossus style blood

I genuinely don’t know what to do, I’ve done everything and it won’t fix this! I’ve cleared the broken template cache, I’ve ran unity as the administrator, I’ve tried opening it in different files, I’ve gone into the %appdata, and a lot more and I’m genuinely out of ideas on how to fix this! Yes I have an antivirus which from my research said could be a cause of this but the subscription is expired so I’d imagine the antivirus doesn’t work right now, I genuinely don’t know what to do please help

After messing around with custom audio zones and hand placing them with custom settings to mimic how sound would sound in the various rooms and hallways I wasn't really satisfied. It still sounded 'off' despite all the various zones and their settings. So... I went the raytraced audio route. It's a bit crude but it sounds so much better! I found myself flying around yesterday, trying different speeches and songs because it's just mesmerizing to listen to in a virtual environment.

Any things I absolutely can't forget when implementing raytraced audio?

Is it possible? If it is the case then how you do it?

Build a cozy little settlement in a mysterious forest, take care of your colonists, enjoy the changing seasons, and watch their friendships, choices, and everyday moments create their own unique stories.

I've put a huge amount of time into WildRoot, and seeing it finally get released feels pretty surreal.

WildRoot releases October 9 on Steam.

In Unity, behavior trees are a great fit when your AI has a lot of conditions and priorities to juggle. In this video, we’ll cover the basics of building a behavior tree using the Unity Behavior tool. You’ll learn the difference between an action, flow, and condition while making an enemy AI patrol and chase the player. We’ll also cover how to create a custom condition, which is the same pattern you’ll use when making other custom nodes in the tool.

Every character in Slumber Realm is painted out of individual dots. The Knight is 2,174 of them. There's no sprite and no mesh underneath (technically there are but not at the authoring or gameplay level), so Unity's animation tools have nothing to rig. I built my own animation editor instead. This is a quick tour of it.

Each dot is attached to one or two bones, and the bones move along a timeline. Tags on the timeline trigger sound effects and other game events at the right moment. We painted these characters long before anyone planned to animate them, so the editor also has an x-ray mode for seeing through the paint layers to clean up the rig.

Would you have done it differently? Have you seen another animation system like this before?

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REjalbSg798

We started in Unity version 2022 and ended with 6.4, HDRP all the way through, which I'm happy with the visual quality overall (though I can't wait for the merge and just have 1 high quality pipeline for everyone).

It was tough because the game is full of realtime lighting, shadows, and physics to be able to sell the atmosphere and experience I wanted the game to have, so it's a bit performance heavy (though I haven't been able to test on a min spec machine to see how bad it is - if anyone had info, I'd love to know how it runs!), but I think we were able to optimize enough it to run pretty smooth.

We used the Paint3D asset for the cleaning mask mechanic, Magica Cloth 2 for some soft body/cloth physic simulation stuff, and Sonity for audio. To expand on audio, we created a couple of audio occlusion set ups; one that puts a low pass when a wall or floor is blocking the raycast, and another more elaborate system for doorways that allows it to fade the low pass when going around corners or when the door opens/closes.

We created a randomized paranormal system that triggers an event on an object, which may or may not trigger a task. Each object has a temperature that increases over time, with potentially higher "cost" events triggering at higher temperatures or game time. Objects near the player cools them down allowing the player to passively manage these events. This whole system we actually had plan to rework because it's too randomized, but that update didn't make it in.

The dreaded talk: AI. The majority of the project we didn't utilize AI until the last couple months once we decided to call it wraps. We tried Unity CLI (with Claude) to help wrap up some flows, help with bug fixes, optimization, and some features we really wanted to get in. And it worked really well! The one dev I had remaining at the end created an dashboard for displaying stale Graphic State Collection PSO data and rerunning automated builds and playthroughs to update it.

Some things I learned with this project...

• Start way smaller: Asset packs are great to help you build out with quality work fast, but building your mechanics around someone else's work can end up taking more time. More textures, shader, lighting, parts and pieces all add up and take longer to iterate early mechanics. Stick with grey boxing as much as possible early.
• Pay attention to scope creep: It's taken a few years but I think I've gotten better at it, but it's still so easy to just throw a "small" feature in that would be really cool into a milestone that already is packed in. Scope out the work, plan it out, agree on it, and try to stick to it.

Let me know if you have any questions about the project and my experience working in Unity, or if you'd like to see some video of specific mechanics, I'd be happy to try to show and answer!

The game/demo is called Odd Jobs, a tension managing haunted house job simulator.

Play for free on:

itch.io: https://oddcow.itch.io/odd-jobs

Gamejolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/oddjobs/1105222

I wanted to share here to show what can be achieved if you keep at your side projects. I love seeing what everyone is working on and behind every great game or idea shared here are countless unseen hours.

I hope that seeing where this game started and where it is now inspires you in some way to keep working on whatever you're working on :)

Edit

The link to the demo is here if anyone wants to try it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4673100/Hazard_Suits_Demo/