Diegetic Combat Text

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Continuing on my quest on getting more traditional UI elements in the game engine, I figured to go with the seemingly simple task of combat text. Having the text in-game not only adds some depth and interactivity, but in this case I gave it physics to interact with the static world.

The first big hurdle was that since the text is a physical actor in the world, it gets really small when far away. A simple solution is a algorithm to scale the actual actor based on it’s distance to the owner’s camera. I think it’s kinda strange but I actually like it.

Lighting was another unforeseen hurdle, typically the UI layer isn’t effected by lighting so is always pristine but once you put it in the game then you have problems seeing it in unlit areas. I had to do some material trickery to have it unaffected and still ‘pop’ from the rest of the world. In these clips you’ll notice the text’s reflection on the ground, another cool side-effect of the diegetic approach.

I don’t know if the result is better than just rendering on the UI layer, but I think the physics interactions are unique and just needs some polish to look awesome.

Simple text in VR

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Finally getting around to the Robo Recall Modkit and instantly I see a pet peeve of mine, the ammo text on guns

Looks fine, right? Let’s see it on a light background

Of course, we lose readability. Here’s my seemingly simple solution:

Stroke and a black background? Well, sorta, if you take a closer look you can see there’s depth and layers, and a tinted glass background to mute in every situation.

Layers stacked in Z-space looks great in VR as you get that Parallax effect. I initially wanted to limit the angle of the text so it was always facing the camera but it wasn’t even necessary, the layers make it readable at almost any angle.

The UI layer keeps dying..

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While working on the recent Ludum Dare, a few friends asked for a quick component to show a path to a target point. Instinctively I started working on converting 3d points to 2d lines.

It was a complicated translation, but it worked. It was clear that it wasn’t going to hold up with complicated paths with varying depth.

I started ‘fixing’ it to change it’s look based on the distance from the camera and then had a moment of clarity, why not just render the path in the 3d space? It’s a solution that I seem to come about more and more lately.

A lot better, now it can have natural depth, be effected by lighting and match post-processing effects in the game.

War Commander

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War Commander is a 2D Real-time Strategy game originally designed to run on Facebook. It was made during my time at Kixeye in San Francisco as a Gameplay Engineer doing both client and server work but eventually specializing in UI as Funtional UI Lead. I worked on a team of about 30 developers as a live product with bi-weekly updates.

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Turbo Granny

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Turbo Granny is a top-down retro driving game where you’re an old lady that’s desperately trying to get to church! Turbo Granny is a flash-based web game commissioned by Adult Swim during my time working as a contractor for PixelJam. I was the lead programmer on a small team with a deadline of about 2 months.

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Hipster Kickball

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Hipster Kickball is a retro sports game that also has some groovy mini-games built in. It was a flash-based web game commissioned by Adult Swim during my time working as a contractor for PixelJam. I was the lead programmer on this seemingly simple game, but managed to make some pretty robust AI as well as a custom psychics system for combat.

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