Lightning Rod Games

Yeah, it looked a bit like this. #gamedev #indiedev #gameart #techart

A cartoon office lit by a sunset. There are lineups of characters standing at different angles to demonstrate lighting.

A list of buttons showing various tools options.

A zoomed out view of the office scene showing that the only objects that exist are the objects visible to the camera.

In #Unity3D, you need to worry about dependencies. If a scene references an asset, it will get loaded into memory (EVEN IF HIDDEN). We broke our game into hundreds of environment-only scenes that can be dynamically loaded, and then made tools so we could work without creating dependencies. #gamedev

Tree nearly identical images of a cartoon woman stand in a forest environment to demonstrate blob shadows. In the leftmost image, there is no shadow and she appears to float above the ground. In the centre image, there is a circular shadow projected on the ground underneath her. It is clear that she is on or close to the ground, but she still feels a bit disconnected from the environment. The rightmost images shows the same circular shadow, but additional (much smaller and darker) shadows are on the ground where her feet make contact. It is clear that she is standing on the ground and that her feet are pressing on it.

Real-time shadows go a long way to help characters feel connected to the environment. Sadly, you can't always afford them (computationally). Blob or projector shadows are a good solution, and having multiple levels of projector shadows (for body, feet, etc.) are even better. #gamedev #gameart

A cartoon woman drawn with warm colours and round shapes sits perched atop the words A Fold Apart. A cartoon man drawn with cool colours and hard edges sits perched on the other end. The both look relaxed and are holding their phones. Two heart-shaped word bubbles come out of each phone and merge in the middle. The text reads: Distance means so little when someone means so much.

Was digging through some old assets and found this from a one-pager for A Fold Apart. Thought it was cute and worth posting. So much work went into the characters and the shape language of the game. It seems simple and obvious because it took a lot of work to get it that way. #gamedev #gameart

It was here and now it is fixed!

Playing through to look for problems and found a couple. Can you spot the artifacting because one shader doesn't have double-sided global illumination? #gamedev #gameart #afoldapart (yes, I did add that hashtag just because it rhymed 😌)

Maybe! This is an older game (where the artists had some pretty big memory constrains) that I'm playing with. Right now I'm having fun doing this on purpose, but I just discovered (or re-discovered) that Unity doesn't let me bake different layers separately on the same map. bsky.app/profile/ligh...

Agreed! Doing it on purpose now. bsky.app/profile/ligh...

When you crank the indirect multiplier on purpose #gamedev #gameart

When you accidentally crank the indirect multiplier #gamedev #gameart

A blue cartoon man wearing a blue suit and gold tie looks out of a round airplane window. Instead of a face, he has many smaller faces laid out in a grid patter. Stark red letters paint the title: A Fold Apart

#tbt to this weird bug that looked like a horror poster. #gamedev #indiedev #gameart

The Unity editor view of some apartment buildings atop floating islands with very bright lights and a giant heart floating in the air nearby. The lighting is vivid and the bloom is extreme. It is pretty, but it might hurt your eyes if you stare for too long. Some elements of the image have been censored with a pixel distortion filter. There's probably no reason for that.

Sometimes, I love the looks when a bunch of scenes get loaded together and the lighting explodes. #unity3d #gamedev #indiedev

Happy New Year 😘

It's important to know where to stop. How much will people really look at the background water? They'll probably be reading the text messages. Doesn't that dialogue look compelling!? #gamedev #indiedev #gameart

Does fixing mistakes feel better than not making them? #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d

Making a water shader that looks like crumpled paper. Funny when you accidentally invert the colours. #unity3d #gamedev

A screen capture of the Unity Scene editor showing two blue cartoon characters. The one on the right is glowing slightly and doesn't look like they're part of the larger office scene that they're standing in. The one on the left has a slight glow around most of them that makes them stand out from the background, but the glow is not present under their feet, so they still look like they're standing in the room. There is a screen capture of a shader tool showing how the glow was limited with an arrow pointing to the character on the left.

A Fold Apart used emissive glow so the player stood out in puzzles on small screens. They popped too much on big ones though. I wanted to try fresnel edge glow, but it made the character look like a cutout. But then adding a smoothstep to the world normal y made them pop AND blend #unity3d #gamedev

Some beautiful stuff in here! #indiegame

A composer sent me their portfolio and they used AI images as the visuals for their tracks on YouTube. My gut reaction was that the music was AI too. I suppressed that reaction, did some digging, and figured the music was legit, BUT that first impression put a stink on the whole thing.

The time and resource crunch meant A Fold Apart, though very pretty, was left with some rough edges. We took some time to port it to #unity3d 6 and I've been looking at what it would take to bring back some of the rendering techniques we had to set aside for performance. #gamedev #devlog #indiedev

At the start, A Fold Apart was thought to be too complex to work on mobile hardware, but a series of coincidences set the groundwork to make it possible. A thread. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

A blue cartoon woman with square features smiles at the camera, her eyes are closed, and she is adjusting her square glasses. She looks very pleased with herself.

The workflow broke each level into dozens of scenes. The intent was to just let us keep making the game, but it also organized data so that we could load exactly what was needed on the screen, and no more. So the answer wasn't "No", it was "Maybe?" And by the time Apple came along, it was "Yes"

A blue cartoon woman with square features screaming and holding her hands against her face. The background has purple streaks in the same direction her body is lurching in order to emphasize the scream.

Each paper looks into two completely different worlds and there can be dozens of papers in a level. Early in development, we totally overwhelmed the Unity editor. The scenes got so big that they were impossible to work with, and I had to create a new workflow. This is what saved our butts.

A blue cartoon woman with square feature and square glasses typing furiously on a keyboard. Her hands are motion blurred and orange sparks are flying out of the keyboard.

But then some friends at a little Polish publisher (known for emotionally compelling games) asked us if we could make it work on mobile. I was skeptical but as a rule, you should never say no to such things. Instead, we decided to check. Just what would it take for this to work.

A blue, cartoon, woman, with square angular features, and square glasses, tilts her head to the side and looks quizzically at the camera. Two large question marks float next to her head.

A Fold Apart had a tricky dev cycle. It was first intended to be a PC/Console game. This was mostly because I thought the amount of runtime math required to fold the paper, and the magical paper effects relying on GPU fill-rate, would make it impossible on mobile hardware. But then...

We are not hiring, but I was responding to cold-call apps. today and it occurred to me that I need to be taking precautions against AI in that process. This skepticism is going to hurt juniors a lot! 2D artists might need to put extra work into their portfolios to prove they're real, and that sucks.

Absolute monsters 😱

I probably should have paired this with an enticing photo... really get 'em going. #indiedev #gamedev