Tools Tools Tools

Tools are probably one of my favorite things to code. Tools and pipeline scripts often do not get the attention they fully deserve or worst yet they get skipped over completely because the task seems so small to waste code on. Most commonly what happens is that tools start to get designed and built as soon as a project starts.

The problem there is that tools are meant to simplify and improve workflow but there is no way you can actually know your problems before you are fully sure of what you are making and what the actual problems might be. Sure you can always give it your best guess and try and have the tools solve problems you think you might run into or to build the workflow that you assume might be best.

The reality is that it is better to grow your tools in the beginning by keeping them small and simple. This way they can grow and change as your project grows and changes and adapt to actual production workflows. This keeps your tools light and super affective at their tasks. Tools should also try and leverage any software you have in your workflow. As an example I use Inkscape for all of my art assets.

Inkscape has a really nice command line interface that I use to automatically export my assets to png images, create room files, objects and anything else I might need. This allows me to use Inkscape not only as my art program but also use it for layout. The added bonus is that it removes me, or rather the human element from needing to export all of my assets to the proper files and update their positions in my room file. Plus I can batch process as many files as I need so I can easily make sure that all of my content is up to date. Almost all software has some kind of command line interface and if you are putting together any pipelines or tool scripts you should always start by taking a look at the software you are using and look into their command lines. You might just find something that you didn't even think about.

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Level Buddy | Blender Addon

An old-school CSG inspired level editor add-on for Blender 3D. The add-on is still very much a work in progress but fairly solid for blocking spaces super quickly. Just because graphic fidelity has gotten insanely good and hyper detailed doesn't mean we shouldn't look back how older games were put together, at least that is my opinion. One thing I always come back to is how quickly the tools in the first 2 versions of Unreal Ed 2 and Doom level editors allowed anyone to block out a level, iterate on feedback or try an idea out. So I just took some time to put together a similar pipeline right in my 3d package of choice. I wanted to keep it simple and quick to try out level design ideas. You can use it for simple white boxing of your level, break it up into multiple static meshes and import them into your game engine of choice or you can use that as your starting point to start more detailed modeling ....

Mega Cow | Video Game Mockup

We All Have Crazy Game Ideas...This Is Just One Of My Own Yup its a giant mutant cow... Using Inkscape I made this game mockup after watching some MST3K late one night. I thought it would be fun to play a game where you were the giant creature causing all of the destruction. That is the reason the giant cow is on the right of the screen instead of the left. The player would move through the level from the right to the left, the opposite of pretty much every scrolling game... looks good in my head but might not work in actual game play. Below are some images showing the progression from rough sketch to final mock-up.

Rocky Terrain | Blender Internal Rendering

I saw a really awesome render of some rocks the other day and was inspired to see if I could recreate a version of my own of some rocky terrain so I made this little scene. The scene was modled, rendered and composited in Blender 3D . It is a very simple scene and made just for fun in a couple of hours. The rocks are all subsurface cube objects that I run a noise displacement map on using the world coordinates. This allowed me to just make instances of the cube and drag them around the scene to get different rock shapes. Some of the rocks needed to be scaled to get some more size variation but that is pretty much the only thing that is different about them other then their positions. It was actually really fun to just move the cube around the scene and watch these random rock shapes form. After the layout was done I added in some particle grass to break the ground up. Not enough time was spent on the grass so it looks pretty bad ...

atomic monster

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