magnethead's blog

Been working a bit this Mother's day on a project that we just recently cooked up here at the Fort. This is intended to be a sort of mascot, hopefully one of many, on the site when it launches.

Spaceman Sam

After watching pretty much all of Paul's videos it occurred to me that I've had to do a ton of workflow-level stuff for the game we're working on that the community at large might benefit from. When I started thinking about the more complicated bits and the value that explaining how we're doing them might provide it became clear quickly that the single best thing we're doing is asset and file management.

A couple of quick notes before I get into the "how" of everything being set up.

I have no idea how I missed this. I know I saw something a few months back regarding the work that Paul Caggegi is doing on his "Character Development" animation series but these Blender "tutorials" are absolutely wonderful. He shows a bunch of techniques for everything from subd modeling, to landscape sculpting and I'm certain there will be a bunch more coming down the pike.

A quick tip for all the new Unity users out there when dealing with fonts. Unity appears to create fontgrids out of truetype fonts during the import stage. This in keeping with the overall keep-it-simple-stupid methodology that governs the majority of the Unity codebase (except of course where version control is concerned.)

When you reference a font out of your assets directory; you can control the import size of the font in the import settings dialog. This along with anti-aliasing; and some basic character set information.

Hope this saves someone else a bit of time.

I did a quick comparison (and by quick I mean waiting through a 2 and a half hour upload, thanks Black Hawk Down) between Vimeo and Youtube. While Youtube is playable on the phone; and generally more widely accepted, right now Vimeo is kicking the living shit out of Youtube in terms of output quality. Here's an embed of the new Jam from Urbanfort.

One of my favorite games of all time is the old school Bionic Commando. A thoughtful post-mortem is up on Gamasutra where they talk about charging too little for the game and what a headache scheduling is (big surprise.)

Delicious Bits

I'm presently working on some rough concepts for the next game now that principle modeling is done for the one currently in production. Here's a screencast (sans hot music **coming soon**) of me working on the big PoS.

We're setting things up so you, our loyal fans will have a place to congregate. Doing it publicly probably isn't the greatest idea but whatever. If you don't like it, don't come back.