Dear Monday:

New T-shirt design expressing the feelings of many people about Monday. (in t-shirts, phone covers, pillows, tote bags...)

Head over to redbubble.com. (for the shirts and covers and the rest...)

Design/graphics cheat #2 - Mobile gaming

Mobile gaming is all the rage now, and companies are showing their latest phones, tablets, phones the size of slippers and chipsets for 3D graphics on-the-go.
Everybody are now showing off some awesome looking shaders, effects and high polygon (for mobile) models making sure you realize that it's rendering in real time. There's something that they don't show a lot though and that's real time - level wide shadowing. And there's a good reason for it as well; it's probably one of the more resource intensive stuff to pull off well enough, so people making games are resorting to all sorts of trickery like "baking" lighting, drawing the details in the textures instead, using shadow "blobs" for stuff that's moving... in general cut using realtime shadows in mobile gaming as much as possible.
(It can be done of course, but most of the time you'd be better off faking it and pushing your savings on making the game run at more fps or implementing some more resources into your enemies.)

So where am i going with it? 

Be smart in hiding things and using simple geometry to make shadows. Like the image on the right; those two things are just some of the obstacles in a game i'm trying to make that spew snow balls. 

I really wanted to have some slight shadowing/ darkening effect in those barrels. Light mapping wouldn't work of course because ... that's not how it works... and real time shadowing would be no-no. 

On a game you are trying to include as many devices as possible after-all to potentially have a larger install base. So it's back to old-school tricks, back to basics if you like. The barrels simply have 3 simple planes, with just 2 polygons each, and a simple black texture. Then the texture's alpha channel is set as semitransparent. Each plane will progressively make it look as if it's darker and darker the deeper you look. Of course this will only work for stuff that aren't out in the open.

For things that are out in the open, what someone could do is mark areas with simple trigger boxes that are placed in shadowy areas. Then have a simple script that would smoothly make the texture of the object that enters the box's volume darker, and lighter as the object exits. A poor man's light probe if you like. These things do require tweaking though, but the plus is that your game's speed won't suffer and you'll get some nice looking stuff.

Man I feel dumb - Unity animations and scaling.

Don't, just don't change the scaling of an object inside Unity. Even if your object has 50 polygons.
It'll f@(k your fps. Pardon the language but it'll just ruin your day if you are doing for mobile. Just take the extra time to make your scaling animation in your 3D package of choice and save the animation as blendshapes or whatever it's called in there.
I just wanted to squish 2 bellows. But nooooo. I have to do the whole blendshapes thing. Can't just change the z value.
Sorry, I know it messes up with batching, but I just didnt' expect to lose close to 25fps.
(And I blamed my rigidbodies. Sorry bodies....)

Cthulu in my room?!

Just the shadow of my camera, but when I glanced at it, that was the first thing i thought :P.
The tentacles coming down from it and ... whatever caused those beady eyes.

(And no the poster is not crocked, it's just the angle i took the photo that is at fault here.)

Design consistency

Something to take note when designing anything, is consistency. That's because your users or clients will be conditioned/taught and they'll expect something to "be there" or be in a certain way. It's why the close button on Windows hasn't moved from where it is. It may be changing slowly, but it's still there, looking all Xed and red now.

And my issue is with OS X, or rather the way it has implemented a feature in the Finder; to be able to go back to the folder you came from by using the keyboard. You press Command and the UP arrow on the keyboard. From an engineer's point of view it's fine, because the data on a computer are thought as trees. The more folders nested in other folders you open, the deeper down the roots you travel, and so Command + UP to go up, closer to the surface makes sense. But not with the way the GUI is designed.

Look at the buttons right there on the left. They are pointing left and right as if further back the timeline or forward.
Yet with the keyboard you go up and down. You might say that i'm nitpicking and most probably I am, but it actually took some time to get used to it, it's two different ways of thinking and it's nice that it's not the whole OS like that. Command + left arrow or right arrow does the same thing as Shift + <- / -> as far as I know.







In Windows the Windows key with the arrows does something expected, it throws the window in the directions of the arrows. Stacked to the left, to the right, maximised, minimised, similar to what Control+arrows does on OS X.

By keeping things consistent you make for a smoother UI experience, and keep nitpickers happy :).

Guild Wars 2 - map to be opened after Entanglement?

I'm guessing that a slight oversight in the current map allows you to go out of the standard play area and enter part of the map that is going to open later on. Found it a couple of days ago, but i wanted to stroll around alone for a bit more :P

I know i know, it's not photography or design or anything else based. But i guess it's map and video game ... design? :P

Free tileable stone sidewalk/road texture package for Unity

As the title says. I was taking a stroll around the city and found a stone-paved pedestrians path so i snapped a picture of it and treated it to be tileable. Also made an alpha channel and normal map in the PSD so that Unity's specular shaders will only apply specular to the stone and not everywhere. The asset is free; over at Unity's asset store.

Link: Cobblestone in Asset store

Color (or colour) swatch 3

Color swatch number 3. And no, I'm not using hex for some elitist thing, I'm just lazy.

I prefer to write in my one color box instead of three :D.

And every self respecting graphics manipulation/creation application has hex input anyway.