Open World Gamedev 2023/007
Hi and welcome to the seventh issue of this newsletter! Today's date is 2023-11-01.
You may have noticed it's been a while! Just over three months. Details of what and why in the video! It may be a while before I do the next one too - I've got life stuff going on - all good! - but I think it's unlikely to happen before Feburary 2024.
For this issue I chose a simple and vague theme duo: movement and organics.
Share me: Boosting the newsletter helps more people find it so please do. π₯° Here are the announcement posts for Twitter (opens in a new tab) and Mastodon (opens in a new tab).
Help out: Would you or someone you know be interested in helping out with the newsletter, the Open World Gamedev discord, and Tides of Revival? Perhaps someone who would like to learn some copy-writing, some video production, some basic coding, some community management, some organizing and some spreading of the word? I and my team could use some assistance! :)
π Newsletter Video!
Yes, I put this section first this time! This time I have something really special! An interview with Robert Alderman, the author of the book I'm reviewing. What an absolute pleasure it was! Definitely a joy to hear him talk about his process and thoughts on various open world topics relating to making a TTRPG campaign.
- Gods of the Forbidden North Volume 1 (opens in a new tab). Mini-review: Very inspiring open worldy TTRPG setting and campaign.
- Gods of the Forbidden North Volume 2 (opens in a new tab). Upcoming Kickstarter.
Check out this issue's accompanying video here!
πΊ Videos
- [AI] Evolving AI Life (opens in a new tab) by MakingFromScratch. β¨
- [Animation] Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation (opens in a new tab) by David Rosen.
- [Animation] Character Control with Neural Networks and Machine Learning (opens in a new tab) by Daniel Holden.
- [Art] Stylized trees with Houdini and Unreal Engine 4 (opens in a new tab) by Kris - LucenDev.
- [Game Design] 10 Video Game Fast-Travel Methods We Didnβt See Coming (opens in a new tab) by WhatCulture Gaming.
- [Game Design] 7 Weirdest Fast Travel Systems That Still Beat Walking (opens in a new tab) by outsidexbox.
- [Game Design] Analyzing the Aiming in Zelda TOTK (opens in a new tab) by Walaber Entertainment. β¨
- [Game Design] Fantasy Archery: holding your bow sideways (opens in a new tab) by blumineck. β¨
- [Game Design] Horizon Forbidden West | The Ultimate Retrospective (opens in a new tab) by LongEaredFox. β¨
- [Game Design] How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology (opens in a new tab) by Richard Garriott.
- [Game Design] How One Programmer Created Gaming's Most Complex Ecosystem (opens in a new tab) by ThatGuyGlen. β¨
- [Procedural Generation] Starfield's Procedural Tech Ideas Are built on Daggerfalls Success - Walking the Walk (opens in a new tab) by ACG. β¨
- [Programming] Let's remove Quaternions from every 3D Engine: Intro to Rotors from Geometric Algebra (opens in a new tab) by Marc ten Bosch.
- [Programming] Rendering Engine Architecture Conference 2023 (opens in a new tab) by REAC. β¨
- [Rendering] DF Direct Special: Starfield Tech Breakdown - 30FPS, Visuals, Rendering Tech + Game Impressions (opens in a new tab) by Digital Foundry. β¨
- [Rendering] The rendering techniques of Path of Exile (opens in a new tab) by Alexander Sannikov. β¨
- [Worldbuilding] Creating a Living World in Horizon Forbidden West (opens in a new tab) by Espen Sogn. β¨
- [Worldbuilding] Games that Make You Part of the Ecosystem (opens in a new tab) by Curious Archive. β¨
- [Worldbuilding] How 'Alien' Should Aliens Look? (opens in a new tab) by Curious Archive.
- [Worldbuilding] How Many Legs Are Best? (opens in a new tab) by Curious Archive. β¨
Sidenote 1: blumineck's video channel is amazing for concrete game/fantasy-related archery takes. I think my favorites this time are the NN-based animations, and the legs video.
π Articles
- [Animation] Delivering the Facial Animation for Call of Duty Modern Warfare II (opens in a new tab) by DI4D. β¨
- [Animation] Skeletal animation in glTF (opens in a new tab) by Nikita Lisitsa. β¨
- [Art] Guerrilla Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores Art Blast (opens in a new tab) by Daniel Wade. β¨
- [Art] Tutorial: Eight Ways To Improve Your Pixel Art Characters (opens in a new tab) by Daniel Burke and Ben Chandler. β¨
- [Math] Polynomial Interpolation (opens in a new tab) by Tom Forsyth. β¨
- [Math] Properly Doing Camera Interpolation Through A Target by Zalo.
- [Math] Quadrilateral Interpolation (opens in a new tab) by Nathan Reed.
- [Math] Vector Curves (opens in a new tab) by Nic Tringali. β¨
- [Rendering] Day Night Cycle using LUT in Fragment Shader of Materials (opens in a new tab) by Shahriar Shahrabi. β¨
- [Rendering] Developing a Real-Time Solution for Rendering Trees (opens in a new tab) by Yixin Hu.
- [Rendering] Octahedral Impostors (opens in a new tab) by Ryan Brucks.
Sidenote 2: The pixel art article was really nice I think, and the one about octahedral impostors too.
π¦ Assets, Code & Tools
- [Book] A Complete Guide to Character Rigging for Games Using Blender (opens in a new tab) by Armin HalaΔ. β¨
- [Book] Kickstarter: How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox (opens in a new tab) by Robert Conley. β¨
- [Book] Shadowdark Combat Afflictions (opens in a new tab) by Anders Elfgren. β¨
- [Book] Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design (opens in a new tab) by Courtney C. Campbell. β¨
- [Fonts] Not Jam Font Pack (opens in a new tab) by Not Jam. β¨
- [Library] Clatter (opens in a new tab) by Esther Alter. β¨
- [Library] Hello Worlds (opens in a new tab) by Kenneth Pirman. β¨
- [Tool] Tree It by Evolved. β¨
- [Tool] Instant Impostors (opens in a new tab) by Alex R Heskett. β¨
- [Tool] The Dolmenwood Overloaded Encounter Generator (opens in a new tab) by Josh. β¨
Sidenote 3: Hey if you're writing a blog... please, please include your name easily findable on the page. Looking at you, "Josh". (I just realized I didn't have this on my itch.io profile. Fixed!)
π Cool Nuggets β¨
- Alternative to Adaptive Virtual Texturing (opens in a new tab)
- Bow aiming in TLOU2 (opens in a new tab)
- Breakdown of the bloom effect in Wicked Engine (opens in a new tab)
- Cave System Requirements (opens in a new tab)
- Cliff shader (opens in a new tab)
- Compute shader debugger (opens in a new tab)
- Compute vs fragment performance (opens in a new tab)
- Compute vs fragment performance followup (opens in a new tab)
- Developing a real ocean (opens in a new tab)
- Dragon flying over mountain (opens in a new tab)
- Drawing 737M triangles using Mesh Shaders and hierarchical LOD graphs (opens in a new tab)
- Dynamic shadow maps in Wicked Engine (opens in a new tab)
- Ephemeral Rigging resources (opens in a new tab)
- Finding game funding (opens in a new tab)
- Foliage breakdown (opens in a new tab)
- Fractal, ambient occlusion and shading in 571 chars (opens in a new tab)
- Game design is unexplored (opens in a new tab)
- Human Shader (opens in a new tab)
- Marching squares with interior vertices (opens in a new tab)
- Math for Rounded Corners (opens in a new tab)
- Mech walker (opens in a new tab)
- Medieval Building Generator (opens in a new tab)
- Mountain climbing on a Ceres-sized planet! (opens in a new tab)
- Move Game Asset Builds To Linux (opens in a new tab)
- Non-pixel-art-fonts in pixel-art-games (opens in a new tab)
- Open-source graph-based dungeon generator (opens in a new tab).
- Particle cubes (opens in a new tab)
- Physics-based Motion Retargeting from Sparse Inputs (opens in a new tab)
- Precision loss witchcraft (opens in a new tab)
- Pub with an inverted normal map (opens in a new tab)
- Quick trick to generate a random-looking grid maze (opens in a new tab)
- Rivers in hex-based terrain (opens in a new tab)
- Simulating heat and element interactions (opens in a new tab).
- Soft body physics in Jolt (opens in a new tab)
- Spline Guide (opens in a new tab)
- Spline-to-spline conversion chart (opens in a new tab)
- Starfield smiles and eyes (opens in a new tab)
- Tesseract - Open World Planetary Engine (opens in a new tab)
- Triangle/hex/square and mixed grids (opens in a new tab)
- Voxel town square timeline (opens in a new tab)
- What is an actually controversial game design opinion you hold? (opens in a new tab)
- Window-avoiding ivy (opens in a new tab)
π Bonus Stuff
- [Art] Drawing particle effect sprites (opens in a new tab) by Kenney. β¨
- [Management] How men can help stamp out harassment of women in games (opens in a new tab) by Ashley Blake, Anya Combs and Chantal Ryan. β¨
- [Management] Open Salaries: Ensuring Equitable Pay Through Pay Transparency (opens in a new tab) by Matt Schembari. β¨
- [Math] Car Physics for Games (opens in a new tab) by Marco Monster.
- [Misc] Ending Copyright Could Save Art & Journalism (opens in a new tab) by Benn Jordan. β¨
- [Misc] Kindness as a signifier of intelligence (opens in a new tab) by Muhammad. β¨
- [Misc] The Entire History of Video Games (opens in a new tab) by NeverKnowsBest. β¨
- [Production] How to be your own producer (opens in a new tab) by Grey Alien Games. β¨
- [Production] Video game pitch decks: how you get them 'right'! (opens in a new tab) by Simon Carless. β¨
- [Programming] How to Build Software From Source (opens in a new tab) by Andrew Kelley. β¨
- [Rendering] Behind the Pretty Frames: Diablo IV (opens in a new tab) by Muhammad. β¨
Endnote: As always, thanks for reading! π I'm on Twitter (opens in a new tab), Mastodon (opens in a new tab), Youtube (opens in a new tab).
You can also come and chat to open worlders over at our Open World Gamedev / Tides of Revival Discord server (opens in a new tab). Many of the resources get posted and discussed there first.