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 was really curious about Unity’s new input system. Abstracting player inputs from all different platforms and devices into a single actions set is really smart – I mean, I’ve been working like that for years thanks to the Rewired plugin, it’s great. So it’s exciting that Unity now has a native way to achieve the same. But the big difference is that while Rewired makes it stupidly easy, the new Input system (seemingly) does not. It CAN, but Unity’s documentation is bad at explaining this, and frankly so are most of the tutorials I’ve watched or read, which is why I’m writing this quick guide.
For the purpose of this guide I’m going to assume you have some basic knowledge of the input system, like how to install it and create an Input Action asset. If not, this is one of the nicer tutorials I’ve seen so far to get up to speed (you’d only need to watch the first 6 minutes).
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!
The last quarter of the year is usually a busy one, so let’s get right into it.
At Immer we were working hard on new update. 1.8 added support for images, tables, and footnotes, but I mostly concerned myself with redesigning the colors for the reader. But this was just a step-up to 1.9, which featured an entirely new discovery section with lists and search. This was my focus the past few weeks, and it makes it so much easier to browse the thousands of new books available with this version.
Dutch 1.9 product launch video
In other work-for-hire news, I helped Recharge draw the speakers of a weeklong event and the key takeaways from their talks. I was also contacted by a public speaker whose portrait I drew years ago at another conference to design a t-shirt for his brand. I’ve never dealt with clothing before, so this was a fun adventure. We went back and forth to design the layout, it’s an intricate tapestry of all kinds of elements from his talks and social media presence. Putting it together was quite a puzzle, but it turned out pretty cool I think!
The design, and him wearing it in one of his videos
Meanwhile, I went down a rabbit hole on 3D foliage optimization in my game Wanderwoods. Rendering a large forest is not easy on the ol’ graphics card, it turns out. I set up the Vegetation Engine plugin paired with Amplify Imposters to really go to town on batching and simplifying the tree meshes. It was easier than I expected, though still a lot of busywork, but the result is very good; Trees look fine from a distance, lighting still works well on them, but performance is dramatically improved.
I also continued chipping away at my new game prototype. I don’t know if I mentioned the concept previously, but it’s a third-person art thief stealth game. It’s been fun to add new features like throwing objects and more, but in the back of my mind I started seeing some obstacles, 3D art being the foremost. Greyboxing is well and good for this phase, but at some point this thing is going to need to look better in order to pitch it to publishers. And I’m no star at 3D modelling, nor do I have the funds currently to hire someone. Plus, managing all aspects of the development process started to feel a bit overwhelming. So all in all things were taking longer than I’d like.
At this time I came across a job opening for another indie game on Twitter. It was a temporary remote contract on a beautiful little first-person exploration game, and I thought this might be perfect to get more experience working in a small team on a similarly-scoped game. I wondered whether this was a smart preparation step before tackling my own project, or whether I was running from it, but I chose to go with the former explanation.
I had a nice interview, but unfortunately they went with someone else in the end. During the interview I showed an old game of mine, The House On Holland Hill, which was the closest in style and mechanics to what they were building. But when I replayed that game, it felt dated. It looked pretty basic, performance wasn’t great, I wasn’t too happy with it. This is still my favorite project, and the most complete ‘game’ that I have out there.
So, I made a decision to remaster the game. I had learned a lot in the meantime, and decided to apply it. Of course, this opened up a can of worms, aka my old idea archive, and the remaster kind of grew into a director’s cut kind of deal. And I figured that if I was going to put in that kind of work, I might as well take it all the way to Steam, the premier PC games marketplace. I’d previously always posted my games on itch.io because it was easy, free, and I liked the vibe of the games available there. But Steam, Steam is the big leagues. And again, I figured “this is a good preparation for your big game project”.
I expect I’ll be working on this through the end of the year, and hopefully releasing somewhere in Q1 2022. Stay tuned for more info!
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of itch.io, thé online marketplace for interesting indie games these days, but I never added ALL of my projects before. And it would have been weird to upload unfinished games to a webstore, but itch has evolved tremendously lately, offering support for limited betas and early access games. So now you can find all of my personal projects of note at hedgefield.itch.io.
But wait, there’s one more thing.
Last year I stopped blogging weekly about my indie escapades and created a once-in-a-while newsletter, but I noticed that I then also shared less little gamedev insights, something which the blog was perfect for. So I’m bringing that back. As I wrap up work on the first Orlova beta for an upcoming event, expect more work-in-progress posts. It’s time to turn this place back into a proper devblog.
Starting with the new title screen for Last Voyage of the Orlova.
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.
Last week marked the end of a few running tasks, which thankfully cleared the board a little bit.
On monday we submitted the grant application for our literary game idea. Somewhere next month we’ll receive word on whether the judges think it’s cool enough (and thus receive the first batch of funding for a prototype), so for now we sit tight and await the result. It was weird to submit something based on an idea without any kind of prototype or concept art, but I think even in this form it already sounds pretty cool.
The rest of the week was mostly spent on the last bits of art for the current sprint of the Hubbub game. We had some trouble contacting the client because of changes in their management etc, so we didn’t quite end up where we wanted to be, but we still made huge progress and have a version you can play through from beginning to end. Next week we’ll probably kick off one more polishing sprint and then get ready to deploy it in the first museum. I’m looking forward to sharing what we’ve been working on.
Halfway through the week I also got the input I needed to start working on a few illustrations for returning client Hoog+Diep. I only had until today to work on them, but the scope was exactly right for me to work on comfortably, and I delivered the final bits this morning pending any final feedback. Little assignments like that are great to fill up the empty space in your planning, easy and fun to work on and done quickly, allowing me to enjoy the great weather on friday.
Over the weekend I did some work on Deck 5, a small scifi game I’ve had lying around for a while – you may remember it from weeknotes past. I went back and forth on its design a lot, going from 2D adventure game to firstperson exploration game to isometric 2.5D puzzle game. I think I finally hit the look and feel that I envisioned when I drew the first mockup back in 2010, and I’m excited to start making content for it once I finish Home Rule and Reconquista.
Below you can see the progression of the game since 2010. I’m particularly excited by the billboarding-shadowcasting-sprites in the latest prototype.
Concept art from 2010
A 2013 prototype in AGS
The 2015 Unity prototype
Bonus: the doors from the 2014 early early Unity prototype.
https://vimeo.com/73655259
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.
Having finished the first phase of the Museum Game project, this week was a bit of a breather, and an opportunity to get into gamedev on my short game whole-hog.
I started by drawing some dailies, but the antics of the cat that night had left me with a bit of sleep deprivation so it didn’t go so fast. On tuesday we ran errands and enjoyed the spring weather, and wednesday I got into knocking out some features. I’m really enjoying working on a 3D game, but the danger in that is that you can endlessly tweak little details and move them around, whereas in 2D you generally want to sketch that all out in advance and then Just Make It™. So I did at least one big feature still on the to-do list a day, from a win / lose condition to building geometry and constructing the general game flow. It’s mostly an exploration game and it’s quite short, but it does need some structure.
This is a moodboard I made to illustrate the tone and look I want to go for. It’s a challenge to figure out exactly how to replicate the different aspects like lighting and contrast, and getting that dense foliage feeling without sacrificing visibility or performance.
And a look at a WIP area.
Next week: Hopefully beta-testing, and writing a Black Feather Forest proposal for the Creative Europe open call for game funding.
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
After the Hackathon last weekend we got some nice press about our concept. I took a day to recover and went to help a friend in their warehouse, unloading new merchandise. It’s nice to do something physically intensive every now and then to break up the monotony of sitting at a desk.
On tuesday I started working on a small game based on the dream I had the friday before. I never made a fully 3D game by myself, always some kind of 2D because I’m not that good at modelling and rigging (pretty bad actually). But this idea needed 3D, and it was small enough that I figured I could manage – it didn’t need complicated systems or GUI, just a character walking around an island. So I pulled open the bag of Unity resources and assets I amassed over the years, and putting all those together actually made something cool pretty quickly.
I started thinking about whether anybody had attempted full body awareness for the player character, and how cool that would be, and before I knew it I had a mecanim-ready character that I pulled off the asset store walking around with a camera in his head; it worked really well!
https://vine.co/v/OUFV6pOZbWg
I continued by building terrain using the Unity Terrain engine, populating it with foliage, and I grabbed Prototype (a plugin by the ProBuilder guys) to make some basic geometry right in Unity. The buildings don’t need a lot of complex shapes so for that purpose it is ideal for me. I continued tinkering with it during the week until I fell down a hole of performance optimization. You could spend hours tweaking the run speed and grass density and draw distance into perfection…
Luckily I managed to climb out of it to build the enemies. All week I had been wandering around the island by myself, shaping it bit by bit, getting to know every corner of it. And now suddenly there was this awkwardly textured sphere, hovering a little above the ground, and ominously following me where ever I went. It was bizarre to me that even adding this abstract shape immediately created tension, and a feeling of dread, like I wanted to get away from it. I can’t wait to replace the sphere with the actual enemy character as I start building out its behaviour this week.
In between I continued work on KLM where we had to change gears to process some new feedback, worked at my part-time job, drew more daily comics, and dug up a few threads that might lead me to new assignments. And I closed the week out nicely by going stargazing at the observatory with my girlfriend.
This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.
It’s strange how much you can disappear into a hole when you’re deep in gamedev. I’ve been working on it all week, but it doesn’t feel like work. I’m having fun.
Even butting up against a problem that grinds things to a halt was fun because such a situation promises a mental exercise, pushing my problem-solving skills to the max. Each problem is a puzzle, and in an almost detective-like way, again, you have to put the pieces together.
So that was thursday, when I spent about an hour lying on the carpet here trying to unite the design that I had with the tools that I had. The days before that I worked a lot on setting up the basic infrastructure of the gameplay mechanics. Talking to people is an important aspect of this game, and so that system needs a lot of thought and effort. It’s not all the way there yet but it’s taking shape.
The final thing I did this week was work on some idle animations. It’s cool how a few blinks and a head-turn already do a lot to make a character seem alive. I’m looking a lot at Puzzle Agent, or Grickle’s style in general. I’m pretty good at animation but at some point it just becomes such a timesink that I’d rather do things as efficiently as possible. And this is not a case where I have time for tweaking the bounce in a walkcycle – in three weeks I need to have a solid demo to submit for an event. Let’s see if I can make it!
I realize this post does little to clarify what the actual game is, and I’m keeping it that way for a little while, so in the meantime have a moodboard.
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