Continuing the tradition of remastering my old games and releasing them on Steam, I turned my attention to Minimal Raider, a gamejam project that aimed to recreate the feeling of the old Tomb Raider games. I’ve always wanted to expand on it with new locations, but first I had to fix the state it was in. The climbing system had some annoyances, the graphics never really made it past low-poly pseudo-greybox, and the architecture was not ready to support multiple levels, so I rebuilt the game from the ground up in Unity 6 to improve both the look and the feel of the experience.
Those of you who have followed along for years may remember that back in 2009, I created a small point-and-click Western moodpiece called Coyote. Recently I returned to it to port it to Unity, polish it up, and release it on Steam. What seemed like a simple remaster turned into a bit of a passion project that adds new graphics, voiceacting, expanded interaction possibilities, rewritten story, and even a whole new scene.
All this to say I’m proud to present Coyote: A Wild West Vignette, now available on Steam and Itch!
My Steam Review tells me I touched 122 GAMES IN 2023*, so to make sense of it all I’m breaking down my highlights of the year and seeing what they tell me about myself. And finally, we’ll look at what my contributions were to the field.
(*Not all of these came out in 2023 but I played them in 2023)
I’m getting more into traditional art now that I’m working on a game about museums, so I felt compelled to do a still life of my view this morning. Laying in bed with my dogs, home alone, I was struck by the beautiful lighting and how it bounced across the room. I’m a massive lighting nerd when it comes to realtime graphics, so I can appreciate some excellent global illumination like this, but instead of putting my render engine to work to recreate it, I decided to paint it.
It reminds me of one of my favorite paintings and certainly my favorite still life that I did, which is this one, of the backdoor in my parental home:
Finally found some time to draw! I was going to do a more realistic portrait, but when I sketched out the silhouette for this one I kinda liked the grungy impressionistic vibe, so I went with it.
Hey there! In the Hedgefield Quarterly Review I look back at the work I did in the past three months, both as a diary for myself and a way to consistently update you on what I’m up to. I talk project details, achievements, and the highs and lows of self-employment. Come follow along!
Better late than never! Last year really flew by, and it felt like it was all about one project, but looking back, I did quite a few thing, so it’s good that I’m writing this recap. Let’s dive in.
I lost my AirPods a few days ago, and I felt like I was living in a CSI episode.
I noticed they were gone in the morning. They were not on my nightstand, nor on my desk, nor in my tiny pants pockets. Ergo, they were lost to me, since those are the only places where I keep them. Fear sets in…
Before being able to do a thorough search I had to leave for work, so I used the Find My app to make sure they were in the house. They were.
When I was at work I checked again, to make sure they weren’t in the car. They were still at my house. I was no longer worried.
When I came home that evening, I used the Find My app to try and locate their signal. I canvassed every floor in the house – but no signal.
It was then that I noticed the last time their signal was picked up was at 14:59 that afternoon…
My wife did do laundry around that time! I searched the machine… but they were not there. Thankfully. Though no closer to finding them, still…
I searched the garden next. I had reason to suspect I lost them the night before, because I had to climb over our fence to retrieve the spare key (don’t ask). But I could not find them anywhere near my area of impact…
Now I’m accounting for two scenarios: the battery died in an unexpected location, or someone found them outside the fence around the time that they were last seen.
Either way, I would probably not find them by searching further. I decided to enable Lost Mode and hope my phone picks up the signal sometime during my normal routine.
We go to bed. I take off the pants that I wore yesterday as well, and instictively reach into the tiny pocket. No AirPods, of course. But I do feel an old set of earplugs that I must have stuffed in there after a concert. That explains why the AirPods case was sitting so high in the pocket the day before I lost it. This could have all been avoided…
A restless night passes.
The next day, upon cross-examinating my wife, she recalls hearing the sound of something falling when I jumped over the fence. Aha! But I searched the garden already with the Find My app to no avail…
But, if the battery is dead…?
I decide to give the garden another go. On hands and knees I crawl around, looking under the deck and through the brush, until… good grief;
I’ve been thinking about my drawing style again lately.
I’ve had a fairly recognizable black and white ligne-claire style for a long time, and it’s still my go-to style when I sketch something out quickly. But for the longest time I wanted to get good at color. Dimme McWood taught me a lot about silhouettes and color harmonies, and the past few years I’ve been experimenting with it a lot more as you may have seen.
I think it goes hand in hand with my gamedev skills improving, to where I can simulate the real world a lot more accurately. And so I’ve been doing that in my 2D work as well, getting more detailed and working with light and shadow a lot more. But that style, it doesn’t really feel like me yet. In particular, sometimes it looks like a photo at a glance. So I’m experimenting with ways to bring these two things back together, and in doing so, finding a sort of recognizable cohesion that binds my work together again.
Today I feel like I got a step closer to that while working on this image. I started with color shapes, added detailed lighting but avoided blending it too much, kept the face details abstract, and at the very end added the outlines, and I like this a lot more than what I’ve been making lately. So I’m going to keep ‘driving down this road’!
When I released my fist Steam game, I wanted to add cloud save support, so you’d be able to pick up the game and continue playing on any platform. Googling for how-to guides only turned up forum posts from gamers talking about it from a user perspective, and most of the Steamworks guides I watched on Youtube glossed over this feature. Eventually I did find the cloud save section in the Steamworks documentation (shoulda looked at that first maybe, huh), but still, like most things about Steamworks, their explanation was a bit more complicated than I feel like it needs to be.
I should take a week off more often I think, I’m well in the mood to draw again! I wanted to do a portrait painting exercise for capturing a likeness and rendering it realistically, without losing myself in too much blending and detail work. So I only used my default brush that I otherwise use for linework.
Dit weekend was ik in @paradisoadam voor @son.mieux. Eerste show weer sinds Het Grote Gedoe, en het was euforisch. Mensen gingen los, Camiel brak z’n voet, Tim Hofman stond erbij en keek ernaar, het was een hele happening. Maar ook Amsterdam lag er prachtig bij op deze lenteavond, en het herinnerde me weer aan alle mooie dingen die we de afgelopen jaren niet of nauwelijks hebben mogen beleven. Het was een lange droogte, hoog tijd om weer eens een slokje te nemen.
Deze metafoor met dank aan Maud, die ergens halverwege de avond afdaalde in de gekleurde mist die op het podium hing om een drankje te pakken. De belichting was precies fantastisch, en dat zijn het soort momenten dat ik denk “tering dit zou een toffe illustratie zijn”. Helaas had ik geen camera paraat, dus heb ik getracht het vanuit geheugen te reproduceren.
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