my yearly post arrives once again at the ripe old age of 33
I’m 33 years old today! That’s as many as three elevens, and that’s just dandy. As is my wont, I’m hammering away at my keyboard to get my birthday thoughts enscribed and on the internet for all to see. It’s been a pretty good year so far! I like to break the previous year apart into little bits when I do this, so here we go again:
on making games without a big engine
Just wanted to share a link to this excellent post by Noel Berry, about making games with small frameworks. I absolutely adore doing this as well, and I feel like this post summarizes so many of my feelings about it in a very succinct and easy to understand way.
getting started
Recently, I’ve been playing the fantastic comedy imsim, Skin Deep by Blendo Games. It’s made in a spinoff of the Doom 3 engine, and has a built-in mod loader on the main menu, so I decided to crack open the game’s existing maps and figure out how to make my own! Read on for the things I found out, and how to get started yourself.
shooting a roll of harman red on my om-10
I recently got hold of a roll of Harman RED; it’s a 35mm redscale film stock. Redscale film is film that is wound backwards in the film canister; that is, it’s wound in a way that you shoot through the layers of the emulsion back-to-front. This results in a large amount of the light entering the camera being absorbed by the red backing layer, resulting in images that are saturated with reds and oranges! You end up with these wonderfully strange and apocalyptic pictures. On top of this, some film scanning machines can get a little confused by this and try to correct the image by massively upping the missing blue levels in the image, which gives you this incredible orange-to-pink-to-blue gradient over the image. Let’s tell a little narrative with these dramatic crimson captures!
useful info
Here’s a link to a really, really well-made video about UI layout engines and how they actually work - specifically, the Clay UI layout engine. Anyone who has tried making their own UI system in a game engine will get a kick out of this, I think! Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by9lQvpvMIc
