Staying positive when all of your hard work was for nothing

When I used to work as a research assistant at university, sometimes I faced the situation where all my daily work was lost because of a power outage and I hadn’t saved my progress. A coworker of mine used to say that lost work is a good thing for a number of reasons: first you pay more attention in the future in order to not lose any work; second you do your work faster the second time because you’ve already done it before; and third you get to review what you’ve done and can come with better solutions than before, most of the time ending with a better product and a deeper understanding of whatever you’re dealing with.

VeilWalker game has been in the oven for a few months now, but the idea of making this game has been under discussion  since December 2015. We’ve had many ideas for game concepts including, but not limited to 2D platformers, 3D platformers, racing roguelikes, shoot’em ups and flying simulators. We’ve even prototyped many of those.

Roguelike racing prototype. Actually not that bad…

Making your game go Ka-Boom with destruction physics

Recently I’ve posted this GIF on Reddit and it received surprisingly good feedback, so I decided to post about how to achieve this effect using Blender and Unity3D.

First of all, you need an object with good geometry, no disconnected vertices or edges, no internal faces or areas with zero thickness. Sometimes you can repair your model with the triangulate modifier. If your model does not have proper topology the Cell Fracture function will fail and you will not obtain the desired results.

The wall that I’ll destroy in this example.

Next, enable the Cell Fracture add-on function in Blender under File > User Preferences…

The secrets to building a smooth 3rd person camera Rig

I’ve tried using free camera rigs available in the Unity asset store, however none of them were as robust as I wanted and most of the time the scripts were unoptimized and hard to read. So I decided to build my own from scratch.

The 3rd person camera rig can be very hard to program, it is arguably the hardest type of camera to make so how do we start?

VeilWalker project Kick-Off

After many months of pre-production and banging our heads on walls, we’ve now established a formal schedule for the production of this game!

We’re a team of five people which is composed by two lead developers and three artists. We’ll be using the Unity3D engine to make this game, and the target platforms are PC and Mac at Steam.

In these initial weeks we’ll be working hard on concept art, game design, and the game engine. The next milestone is the ‘First Playable Alpha’ and we expect to hit it by mid-September. Wish us luck!