Author: joewintergreen
-
a good level design tool finally came out
—
I’ve been testing a friend’s WIP level design plugin for Unreal for a while now, and while it’s still very early, it’s available now on Patreon and you should support it there. It’s bringing Source 2 style geometry editing to Unreal, allowing level design to properly be a thing again, and I made a video…
-
a little car game i am making
—
I guess in April 2023 (holy shit that is longer ago than I thought) I started making a little car game prototype, sorta inspired by Micro Machines/MASHED/Re Volt etc, and I got back into it a bit recently. I guess so far I’ve probably worked on it for under two weeks cumulatively but it’s starting…
-
max payne is a positive male role model
—
Been replaying Alan Wake 2 a bit, having charged through it at launch too quickly, and forever there is a Remedy game thought percolating in my head, and today it’s that Remedy characters talk explicitly about their feelings, which, while the post title is a joke, does give Max a level of self-examination most dudes…
-
ask: abstractions
—
some asshole asked: How do you feel about abstraction vs models for game mechanics? e.g. having a realistic system for aiming a shot vs “roll to hit” It’s pretty situational I guess, but I usually enjoy things less the more abstracted or board-game-rulesy they are, especially in a real-time context. But the less that stuff…
-
“sleight of hand” is a video game i’ve been working on
—
At the moment I’m a Senior Technical Designer at RiffRaff Games, working on a stealth game about a witch. We demoed some new stuff at Day of the Devs the other week. You should check it out, probably!
-
probability is hard to think about
—
so i was working on a game. the game has haystacks sometimes. if you set fire to the haystack, there’s a one in six chance that when it burns away, it turns out to contain a treasure chest! you can get some loot i implement this. much later, QA reports a bug: the chance of…
-
what i reckon about yellow paint
—
For years, more or less annually, the bit of the internet where gamers and game developers overlap has kicked off with aggro debate about “yellow paint”, a handholdy game trope where the player is constantly told what to do and where to go. I always feel a bit insane when this happens. A player thinks…
-
InFlux/Redux comparison/dev thoughts video
—
Just spent some time making a comparison/developer thoughts video of InFlux Redux (2024) vs the original InFlux (2013), which was fun. Here’s me opening the editors for both projects side-by-side and saying whatever it occurs to me to say about the development process(es). Get set for 50 whole minutes of unrehearsed dev thoughts
-
midichloriopathy
—
some canon new Star Wars thing should address midichlorians by acknowledging them as a whole-cloth pseudoscience and gatekeeping device. qui-gon has the right kind of dadvibe to have honestly believed in it. if there’s a reestablished jedi order or whatever they should view midichlorians the way we view, like, physiognomy. the only people who still…
-
ask: good level design tools when
—
Small Victorian Child asked: dear mr wintergreen, when will my father (colloquially known as Good Level Design Tools) return from the war? yours trulysmall victorian child The answer may surprise you.
-
weird west side project
—
In some of my spare time, I’ve been having fun screwin’ around building something out of Weird West assets and concepts, which Wolfeye kindly don’t mind me doing and sharing. I worked on Weird West for years and always wanted to make something else out of their art, which looks amazing close-up. Here’s a video…
-
Auto Material Instance Maker Tool for UE5
—
Here’s a tool I made a while back that you can buy: it lets you automatically create instanced materials for many textures at once, given a base material with parameters to fill. This saves you a lot of time if you have a lot of textures you want to turn into material instances, like: 200…
-
half-life alyx’s level design tools are super great
—
On Twitter once I did a big thread where I went through Half-Life Alyx’s SDK – so this is Source 2 – and had a big ol’ yarn about ’em. That thread turned into a useful resource for some folks, so I made it a Cohost post, and now Cohost is going away so here…
-
helicobacter
—
i had a gastroscopy recently and one of the milder things they were checking for just in case is a totally normal stomach bacteria called “helicobacter” which, when i looked it up, i found out he is a little guy with little flagella that he uses to dig into your stomach lining so he doesn’t…
-
InFlux Redux is out today!
—
That’s what I’d be saying if I remembered to make this post several days ago when it came out. It is out, though! You should buy it on Steam and leave a positive review. 11 years after the original and some amount of years after I started working on it, here’s a blog post about…
-
animating while not an animator
—
One of the things I’m not is an animator, but every few years I give it a crack, and recently I gave it a crack inside Unreal, which now has really good rigging and animating tools. I made a complete Max Payne dive – sideways, front and back, all blending together just like in the…
-
Dev Scoops: XCOM/2’s art direction
—
I had a moan about XCOM 1 being prettier than XCOM 2 the other day and got some nice replies from the Art Director of both, Greg Foertsch.
-
my Deus Ex Lipsyncing Fix Mod: making of
—
Back in 2021 I made a mod for Deus Ex 1 that fixes the lipsyncing and blinking, which, I betcha didn’t know, was broken since ship. Everything I wrote about it is on Twitter, and it oughta be somewhere else, so here’s a post about it. The mod itself can be downloaded here.
-
check out this incredible concept art from Interstate ’82,
—
the inferior sequel to the spectacular video game Interstate ’76. Got ’em off the install disc. Great concept art, not a great game. Interstate ’76 came out in 1997, alternate history ’76, Mechwarrior 2 engine, great story, great characters, great car physics, it’s got a poetry button, you can shoot a pistol out the window…
-
FEAR, HL2, AI, and only doing cool stuff when the player is looking
—
(gravis did a comment on my FEAR post so long he made it a post, and now I’m doing that with that post, and this ends up being about all kinds of things) Half-Life 2 (and maybe 1, but I don’t think so?) had a trigger type called trigger_look, which was like a regular trigger,…
-
f.e.a.r: first encounter assault recon rules
—
The video game called F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon gets a bum rap, even though everyone knows it rules. The bum rap is that everyone thinks it’s just the AI and the guyshoot that rule in F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon, when actually a ton else about F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon also rules.
-
Unreal Engine Plugins That I Reckon Are Good
—
Here is an incomplete list of unreal engine plugins that I like Mesh Tool by Nate Mary is a general modeling tool and the best way to do level design in the editor, though UE5’s CubeGrid tool is really good too (but has fewer functions than this). You can use both together, both just output…
-
the time i made headcrabs in unreal
—
Way before Half-Life Alyx had been announced, I spent a couple of days one Christmas remaking Half-Life 2’s headcrabs (using their existing art and anims) in UE4, but with additional physical reactivity – they can lose their footing and struggle to recover, smash into things and active-ragdoll around after a bad jump, get picked up…
-
-
edsplash.bmp: a collection
—
in the unreal engine, edsplash.bmp is the name of the splash image presented to the user while the editor loads. projects without a custom edsplash.bmp are considered especially heinous. often a given edsplash will never be seen outside its development studio. but sometimes an edsplash escapes onto the internet. these are their stories
-
game dev post: Weird West dissolvin’ walls
—
One of many things I worked on on Weird West is the hiding of walls/floors/etc between player and camera. When I joined the project, roof-hiding and the-floors-above-you hiding were all that was in; the camera went top-down at about 80 degrees when you entered a building. I found that a bit disorienting and wanted to…
-
thoughts about Control (2019)
—
I’m a big Remedy enjoyer, I like Alan Wake and Max Payne and Quantum Break, and I want to like Control, but I don’t, though I like a lot about it. I completed it, was bewildered, and now can’t go back to it. More than anything I’ve seen before, every little thing in it feels…
-
first game-on-shelf experience
—
Recently had (finally) my first experience of “a game I made is physically on a shelf in front of me for sale in a shop”, with Weird West, which is physically out on PS5 now (it’s on other platforms too but not physically, I guess). For whatever reason, I didn’t really expect to feel anything…
-
open source the “source 2” video game engine imo
—
as unity slowly vanishes, and unreal continues to breed unease in pursuit of the least sound impulses of tim sweeney, i sort of think valve could nigh-effortlessly clean up here and make the world a somewhat better place.
-
barrels of game goo
—
On Steam, by grinding away doing pointless shit for no reason, you can earn “Trading Cards”. These can be converted into “gems” which are collected in “Sacks of Gems”. The underlying javascript, though, calls them what they are: barrels of game goo
-
one thing most players don’t know about the scanners in half-life 2 is
—
You can let a scanner serve as a “strider scanner” which occasionally happens not very noticeably in HL2. What this does is, if a strider doesn’t know where you are and is patrolling, and the scanner scans you, suddenly the strider gives a big scary “whoop” and comes running over because the scanner told it…
-
blurred ball
—
Finally trying the material based radial motion blur from ContentExamples (since regular motion blur is bad at things that spin). Works p well
-
if you can get a levitator, then you can get some wasps
—
in troubled times, it is comforting to reflect on this
-
my Weird West first person mod is out
—
When Weird West got its final patch, it introduced mod support, and includes the First Person Mod that WolfEye got me to finish up after I put out a vid of a much jankier version I pooped out a while back. Here’s a kind of low-energy making-of video that I threw together.
-
—
speaking of target audience (which i just was, somewhere else) when i was ~15 i had to interview someone for a school project so i emailed the questions to gabe newell and one of them was about target audience and he said “it’s hard enough making something good without trying to figure out how to…
-
laments on half-life 2’s ai and balance
—
just watched back this video i did about soldier AI in half-life 2 years ago and i still agree with it! what a relief
-
my favourite part of dead space 2
—
is probably this part where you return to somewhere you’ve been before that’s a typical rusty spaceship covered in blood but they mix up the palette by filling it with UV light. Refreshing
-
my favourite part of mirror’s edge
—
It’s the part where they introduce a new named, voiced, modelled and animated character, and he gets this gif’s worth of screen time and is never seen or heard from again.
-
went where i grew up recently
—
haven’t been back in a while, never on my own + with a license. got to catch up with quite a few people, but also a lot of sittin’ around waiting for those opportunities, trying not to get the bad kind of nostalgic. it is beautifuller there than melbourne, i gotta say
-
jedi game tech test
—
I spent 8 hours on this Jedi Survivor tech test when I was interviewing for a Technical Narrative Designer job there a while back. Got offered the job, but didn’t take it. The test called for “a system to manage the narrative”, plus timed lifts that are easy for level designers to set up, a…
-
-
here’s some pretty pictures from a game i had to cancel due to circumstances beyond my control
—
map by Suzanne Will and I
-
if you want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, graphics tech advancements should please you
—
it’s massively massively feasibler than ever before for one-person devs/tiny studios to rapidly iteratively make stuff, all kinds of stuff, from the fancy-graphic’d to the deliberately lo-fi, than it ever has been before, with fewer limitations, because of the same tech advancements that are mostly marketed via boring shit like a realistic building exploding or…
-
an insult to life itself
—
in the famous pre-LLM-bullshit video of Miyazaki where some misguided joker tries to pitch procedural animation as a labour-saving device to, predictably, one of the people on the planet least receptive to it, he is met with (to me) ultra-cathartic disdain. in this post i relate that to the fake art generated by what we…
-
it’s bad for the baby
—
maybe an hour and a half after max payne quits smoking for his baby’s health, his baby is killed, but true to his word, he never smokes again
-
i would like to see good dev commentary in more things
—
the dev commentary in valve games is so interesting and useful and educative, but their games come out once every 10 years or so and most of the rest that i’ve seen do commentary have done it badly
-
pondering whether crowdfunding is still remotely possible in this year of our whatever whatever year it is
—
I want it to be worthwhile – if you have a decent pitch already that you’ve been being turned down by all the usual people for because it’s 2024 – to throw it up on kickstarter or whatever else as a last ditch “give us money and maybe this can happen, otherwise it won’t”
-
-
a funny thing happened when i told a lie on the internet
—
i suggested that this photo i took near my house was a screenshot out of unreal engine 5, and many people believed me and were amazed, or didn’t but were unsure, or recognised it as a troll but thought it was a troll on people thinking it was a photo (which it was), or just…
-
-
dev scoops: Max Payne Kung Fu Edition
—
The most impressive video game mod of all time is for certain Max Payne: Kung Fu Edition, which, despite being by far the most accomplished Payne mod code-wise and having a ton of custom animations high quality enough to fit in with the rest of Max Payne, was developed by one guy, Kenneth Yeung.
-
Dev Scoops: Simulating Eyes in Half-Life 2
—
Years ago, I was making a stealth game in Unreal that I’ve since had to cancel amid circumstances beyond my control. At one point I was trying to make my characters’ eyes nice, and the gold standard for that was (and arguably still is) Half-Life 2. HL2 takes a novel approach: the eyes are not…
-
thoughts on the spiderman 2 video game on the play station five
—
I was playing this, and I webbed up an oil tanker that was going explode (this makes it not explode) and Peter goes “geez, if i’d webbed that up a second later…😬” but of course, it would have been fine, they never explode. Nothing bad can happen in this game. Got me thinking how much…
-
is it an imsim: splinter cell chaos theory
—
imo, yeah a little bit? but it’s not much of one. i reckon the core of imsim is “things are systemic”, they don’t work/not work arbitrarily or case-by-case, and also the world has to be designed as a world, not a level, filled with those systems. this is how you get cool emergent results, and…
-
thinkin bout how
—
it seems like smaller-to-medium-sized game development often starts from recognising some feasibler-than-it-seems, high-bang-for-buck gimmick or tech thing, with which you can reliably wow people, and then imagining an otherwise small-scope game around that
-
the worst part of deus ex: human revolution is actually the best part
—
get around, you were just forced to fight and kill a guy? And everyone was mad? And later the devs patched in other options, basically one for every style of play you might be into? Well I’ve decided they were right the first time
-
design thoughts: inventing a new special infected for left 4 dead
—
Hi I’m Joe and here’s what I’d do if someone at Valve put a gun to my head and told me to add a new type of Special Infected to the video game Left 4 Dead
-
breath of the wild takes from the joe wintergreen take vault
—
instead of the DLC giving you access to quite a slow motorcycle, which sort of undermines horses and climbing and ends up not being very fun, it should have given you a bicycle
-
games should require specific input to pull the pin on a grenade,
—
separate from throwing it. 90% of the potential interactivity of a grenade is collapsed when it explodes
-
Dead Space 3’s ending was really good
—
I mostly ignored Dead Space when it came out, but last year I played the remake and then just recently I finished up 2 and 3 and 3’s DLC, which it turns out (I did not know this) is essential and is the end of the story, and it’s a really good ending. This was…
-
no mmo is good
—
when i was a kid mmos began to exist and my mind was blown by this, but i never played any because there was no money, so my mind was actually blown by its own ill-informed imaginings of what that must be like. i hadn’t even seen any videos. i did not yet understand that…
-
when i was a kid my mum was always enacting illconceived money-saving strategies
—
for instance, when we wanted frozen yoghurt, which is delicious, mum thought it was too expensive. but. what if i were to purchase regular yoghurt and freeze it at home? delightfully devilish, mother (this makes an inedible brick)
-
Sellin’ my Light Audit Tool
—
Selling this on itch and fab. It’s a helper widget I made to help track down expensive lights in UE5. Sorts all the lights in your scene by how expensive they probably are (based on how many shadow casting objects are in the radius, etc). Also gives you an easy way to directly change properties…
-
frustration
—
feels like my gamedev superpower is “not getting frustrated easily by tasks”. when something goes wrong frustration is hardly ever what i feel. when it is, it’s pretty hard to push through and often i just don’t. but it’s rare i always see someone hitting a concrete wall that for me (even if stumped) would…
-
palworld
—
everyone getting into this fake ai pokemon game shit is the type of person to wish their dead friend back to life on a monkey’s paw and when they see the friend Came Back Wrong and is a rotting soulless animated corpse they’re like, fuck yeah he’s back! 😍 everyone’s like “well people are desperate…
-
gta4 minimap thoughts
—
Playing GTA4 and thinking about how much a minimap can ruin this type of game. GTA and Red Dead 2 both become whole different games when you turn it off, in a weirdly instantly-refreshing way. In RDR multiplayer, I got a friend to turn it off as we were just riding our horses around, and…
-
gta4 and accidental anachronism
—
The best way to play GTA4 these days is with DXVK and several mods to fix things which never worked in the PC version, or have broken since, and to make the graphics less bad. Is that the way I just played through the entire game? Haha, no! I set all this up and then…
-
ask: porting games to the switch
—
@Xuelder asked: What is the biggest technical hurdle you see when porting games to the Switch?
-
ask: should tim sweeney open-source UE1
—
@ETPC asked: should tim sweeny open source unreal engine 1 and 2 absolutely. i gather the reason this doesn’t happen (at least for 1) is a valve-style “it would require a fair bit of work nobody ever feels like doing”. but it would fucking rule i feel like it’s not acknowledged enough that unreal engine…
-
spiderman thoughts
—
I want a Spiderman thing that recognises that there’s usually no reason for an investigating cop to think a guy webbed to a wall even did anything. Like wouldn’t that immediately turn into trying to prosecute Spiderman for randomly tying people up and running away Spiderman stops a mugging, suspends the guy from the power…
-
ask: half-life 1 anniversary update
—
@blazehedgehog asked: You touched Valve’s 25th Anniversary update for Half-Life yet? Does it meet your standards? My standards for Half-Life 1 Anniversary Updates are “absolutely nothing for 24 years” so yeah I’m blown away! They’ve been making the occasional obscure fix for years – a lot was broken, but a surprising amount was added or…
-
i think the ai art thing is really about,
—
people aren’t comfortable with their own disinterest in things. they don’t want to make art but they want to want to. they can’t make themselves want to. but that’s not ok with them. but they imagine it would feel good to have made art i think these people are in a real distressing crisis of…
-
ask: why do i think max payne 3 has bad graphics
—
Anonymous Guest asked: Honest question (as in I’m not just asking this to rile you up)…. why do you think Max Payne 3 has bad graphics? Like, there’s a lot to not like about “the Housers present: knockoff Man on Fire starring Max Payne for some reason” but I genuinely dig it’s PS360 era grime.…
-
10 years on from Max Payne 3
—
and 19 years on from Max Payne 2, it’s interesting to note that while 2 had good graphics, for 3 they decided to go with bad graphics. every project is different
-
Ugh I Guess I Want To Move From Unity To Unreal Dot Com
—
Decided to do something useful: whipped up a quick Internet Site for all the Unity folks who now want to learn Unreal and don’t know where (or whether) to start because it’s daunting as hell. http://www.ughiguessiwanttomovefromunitytounreal.com
-
played a bit of metal gear ground zeroes
—
i never played any metal gears besides phantom pain which i didn’t like very much mostly. ground zeroes seems like what i wanted from phantom pain: linear-nonlinear missions with a surprising amount of freedom of movement, in the dark, in the rain, pleasing systems in surprising places, cool smart takes on commonplace interactions. a modern…
-
no mmo is good
—
when i was a kid mmos began to exist and my mind was blown by this, but i never played any because there was no money, so my mind was actually blown by its own ill-informed imaginings of what that must be like. i hadn’t even seen any videos. i did not yet understand that…
-
unreal engine general beginner tips for persons who are beginning with unreal engine
—
Spent some time on a comment to help someone out who was having trouble starting out in Unreal, but it might as well be a post, so here it is: Unreal is really good, but it doesn’t teach itself well, which frustrates me a lot. Once you’re across it it’s wildly empowering, but getting across…
-
apple vision pro announcement thoughts
—
the Apple Vision Pro (???) announcement video is vibeswise identical to every other Big Tech Announcement Video you ever get now – not only rancid, but so overwhelmingly rancid that it’s literally hard to talk about. it’s such a dense ball of interwoven awfulness that pointing out any individual strand of it feels like you’re…
-
i dislike “official [region] [topic]” internet communities
—
as in, “the melbourne writing community” or “the perth gamedev discord” or “the hylian ornithology forum”. all you have to do is use that format to name your website or forum or discord and everyone seems to go with it, as though all of a sudden there is a single canonical “Hylian Ornithology Community” or…
-
the time a did a payne face
—
on a challenge issued by my discord, i took a photo which was variously modded and photoshopped into max payne
-
—
one of the least pleasant parts of running a conspicuously lefty online community of some sort is when someone who’s ostensibly all about empathy and kindness comes in looking for a fight this happens in my discord a couple times a year. someone busts in and starts making garden variety political statements everyone agrees with,…
-
porting Adios To The Nintendo Switch Entertainment System
—
Couple years ago, I handled the port of Adios, the game about the pig farmer who doesn’t want to dispose of corpses for the mob anymore, to the Switch. It took a week. The Switch is weak as piss, so this is always a little bit of a pain, but the port ended up looking…
-
nine eleven post
—
i remember the morning 9/11 occurred I was 11, and i was not familiar with the existence of the twin towers, so i went on “Keyhole Earthviewer 3D” (Google Earth before Google bought it) to have a look, and the satellite photo had already updated and all you could see was smoke
-
You know what’s a good curse?
—
Pirates Of The Caribbean 1 curse. Steal a coin, have a terrible time til it’s all returned. Solid curse. Real nobody-to-blame-but-yourself curse. Easy to lift unless you’ve really gone nuts with your spending, else potentially impossible. Good curse. You know what’s a lousy curse? Pirates 2 curse. Cursed with a spot on your hand that…
-
Dev Scoops: Max Payne 2’s character shadows
—
A while ago I tweeted about Max Payne 2’s character shadows, which were really nice for 2003. Luckily, a couple of Remedy folks who worked on the game saw it and provided scoops:
-
ask: ideal games job
—
@johnnemann asked: If you could wave a magic wand and have your ideal video game studio to work in, what would that look like? How big, what roles, and what would your job be?
-
ask: dishonored thoughts
—
Anonymous User asked: say a thought about Dishonored. maybe multiple Dishonored rules, obviously. Here are some selected thoughts I have had about Dishonored.
-
ask: level design tools
—
@porglezomp asked: I remember I originally followed you on Twitter for level design tool review stuff. Do you have opinions on level design tools that should exist but don’t? I always want to hear about tools i have many such opinions but i’ve spent so much time expressing them over the years that i’ve somewhat…
-
ask: the next big video game tech junk
—
@mahalis asked: what do you see as the next big tech challenge that the engine people should try to solve, post-Nanite and Lumen? (I realize neither of those is “done” so we’re not exactly post- them, but you probably get what I mean)
-
ask: favourite Dishonored levels
—
Anonymous User asked: favorite Dishonored level from each game? (I’m the Dishonored Anon I’m only capable of thinking about the game Dishonored)
-
at a chip shop in scotland,
—
i ordered a “sausage in batter” and the woman i ordered it from gave me a look like i was the stupidest prick in the world and said “we only do them in batter”. i said “i’m just reading off the menu”. she rolled her eyes. the menu was next to us both, large backlit…
-
game dev post: Weird West and the Case of the Cursed Strawberry. cw: unsatisfying conclusion
—
So in this game Weird West, you can cut foliage. Like if you’ve got a machete or something you can cut away grass or bushes or whatever, and some of them drop stuff. I did a post about some of that stuff. A little while after ship, I got a bug assigned to me where…
-
game dev post: cooking and crafting in Weird West
—
More stuff I did on Weird West: the Cooking/Crafting system. You can cook raw food over a fire or stove, use forges and tanning racks to craft weapon upgrades and armour, smelt ingots from nuggets or melt ingots back down into nuggets, etc. Arguably what I did for this ended up being a little overengineered…
-
dev scoops: Fire Propagation in Weird West
—
Here’s something I did on Weird West that I thought was cool: fire propagation across grass and foliage. Lots of stuff is flammable in the game, and there’s a general elemental signal system that handles most of those interactions, but foliage needed some special handling.
-
—
randomly remembered the time i met palmer luckey when the oculus dk2 was new. i was like, “positional tracking is super cool, but the camera is a bummer. keen for in a few years when you can do it without an external camera” he goes “no, that will never happen. it’s impossible”