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Making progress

An insecurity I had about moving forward with scripting/making the state machine video was that I didn't have enough experience/evidence gathered to support the core thesis. Luckily, gathering evidence involves making progress on my game, so this is win-win as far as I'm concerned. Here's a little peek of some ideas I've been playing with.

Enemies can emote the state of their awareness system m...

State machines and emergent behavior

Another candidate video idea on the backlog is the way I've been approaching game AI design, and more broadly, gameplay design. A very natural approach in action gameplay design is to separately design enemy characters before assembling them into encounters to take advantage of emergent synergies between them.

For example, enemies that usually require careful timed inputs and movement have to be approached very differently when placed next to enemies that demand immediate attention, ene...

Thoughts on 3D->2D Cameras

There is a germ of a video idea here which has been difficult to distill into an actual script that's reasonably producible.

One of the struggles of making a "top-down" 3D action adventure game in the style of the prototypical 2D entries in the genre is that the camera orientation is not well-defined in 2D games. For example, a tile-based game will often employ a top-down perspective for the ground due to the square shape of tiles, but show walls of buildings and characters from a front...

Pixel Art AA Video Notes

Edit: The final video, and therefore, this post, is now publicly available :) Thanks for the early feedback.

Below are some supplementary notes:

Bilinear Sampling

In the video, I describe the bilinear sampler as a box filter, but it's important to note here that I'm referring to a theoretical continuous-domain box filter, rather than a discrete one that you can compute when image processing. Jus...

Upcoming Video

A few months ago I ran into the need to render some pixel art assets at arbitrary, sometimes non-integer upscaling ratios, and not always aligned to the device's native pixel grid, without suffering from the aliasing and jittering artifacts you would normally get with a nearest-neighbor sampler.

This is a subject which has been covered before by others, but I took it just a little further by generalizing it to work for arbitrary texture transforms, such as the kind you get when placing ...

Procedural Animation Video Notes

For a first post here, I thought I'd revisit some points that were cut from the previous video, which some viewers asked about in the comments, as well as some common questions.

Isn't all this math expensive to compute?

This is a surprisingly common question, but while the derivations go through a lot of symbols and mathematical machinery, the final implementation is really quite simple, only involving adding and multiplying a handful of numbers per frame.

By comparison, u...