Tag: unreal
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I/O systems for level scripting
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This week I built a Source Engine style input/output (I/O) system for level scripting in Sleight of Hand, and if you don’t know what that is or means, you have that in common with most game developers. It’s an astonishingly useful thing to have on any game with level scripting (it’s how Valve’s games do…
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impromptu vector field painter, a tool for making vector fields
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A tool I made a long time ago with a little help from the excellent Turfster is my Vector Field Painter, made to be used in VR. It’s a standalone application that’s basically a VR game where you use your hands to “paint” direction and magnitude into a 3D vector field, preview the result using…
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contextual animation stuff in Sleight of Hand
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I’ve been working for the last week or two on a system to streamline contextual or scripted animation stuff in Sleight of Hand, a stealth game with a lot of systemic interaction aspirations. I built an interest source system a while back for coordinated investigations and dynamic behaviours, and while some of those interactions have…
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how Gears of War 1’s train level works
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I just completed Gears of War 1 Reloaded, a remaster of a remaster (lol same), and it ends with a train level. It’s the usual thing, a mostly-static level pretending to be a moving train by deploying various illusions, but since it’s possible that Sleight of Hand will ship with one of these, I was…
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“interest sources”, contextual interactions for NPCs in Sleight of Hand
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I’ve worked with a few “target-based” contextual interaction systems for NPCs on different projects, they’re one of my favourite things to make, and lately I’ve been making one for Sleight of Hand, a stealth game I’m working on at RiffRaff, deets of which I shall here now divulge. Everyone calls these objects something different: at…
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a quest tool i made once
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Some years ago I did a quest scripting tool for an ill-fated open-world game I was contracting on. It was ages ago now, the project’s concluded, and nothing here identifies any of it, so I’m sure nobody’ll mind if I talk about my approach a bit here. My number one concern when creating tools for…
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overdrive: conversation system
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The Weird West side project (called Overdrive) that I started working on some time back is something I rarely find the time to advance, despite having a lot of ideas about, but lately I have a little bit. The other day I smashed out a conversation system! I really love the result (video below) –…
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mgs3 and photorealisming the painterly game
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The recent Metal Gear Solid 3 remake uses a lot of Quixel Megascans (a mostly-free library of ultra-high-fidelity photogrammetry), which I don’t think matters at all in itself, but it’s funny that the bit of wood Snake bites down on when he splints his elbow is 100% identical to a plank you roll over all…
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dev scoops: vultures in Weird West
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The first feature I worked on at Wolfeye when I came on board as (what ended up being credited as) a Systems Designer/Technical Designer was the vultures. As well as being ambiently cool, the vultures play a role a bit like the rats in Dishonored, showing up when there’s dead stuff around and conveniently disposing…
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scything around, 12/04/25
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I am once again aimlessly enjoying the Unreal level design tool Scythe, which I get to test early builds of. Here’s 40 minutes or so’s messing around today using Half-Life: Alyx textures. It’s really a lot of fun.
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tech art thing: mist-dispelling lights
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A while ago I made a cool effect for Sleight of Hand, where (since you hide in clouds of smoke sometimes in this magic-themed game), we were experimenting with a type of lantern that guards could carry around and it would dispel any smoke or fog around the light. The fog is all volumetric, so…
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further adventures in scythe
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I continue to spend time screwing around in Scythe. It’s so fun to finally be making maps again properly in Unreal. Some of the folks in my discord took to scything on stream and a couple times a bunch of us have just chatted and scythed, it’s a good vibe. All this stuff took no…
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adventures in scythe
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I’ve been messing around in the aforementioned Scythe level editing tool for UE5, here’s some of what I’ve been doin’
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new tool: Impromptu Texture Browser
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This is a “texture browser” utility widget for UE5.5 that presents materials in the style you’d expect from a level editor in the 90s: as square thumbnails. Unreal normally presents materials in the content browser as lit and mapped to a sphere. This isn’t useful for much. When you’re making a level, you want to actually see the images you’re working with. So this plugin presents them that way. It looks like Hammer’s texture…
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Unreal Scoop: Data-Driven CVars
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If you use UE5, you might have noticed there’s a new-ish feature called Data-Driven Console Variables, and you might also have noticed that nothing comes up when you Google this. There’s not much to it, but in the interests of having something come up when you Google this, here’s what I’ve figured out about data-driven…
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Unreal Scoop: Make your own “shaded textured unlit” viewmode real quick
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Hammer, king of level editors, has a view mode where the scene is unlit, but not fullbright; it’s shaded to make it easier to parse. Unreal doesn’t have that! But you can add it yourself, really easily, with no C++ or Blueprint – just a postprocess material and a line in a config file. Here’s…
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Unreal Scoop: Making a “Compiling Shaders…” Screen
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Unreal has a reputation amoung the ill-informed for being plagued by shader compilation stutter. As an attribute of Unreal itself, this is basically made up – devs are just not always doing what they are supposed to do pre-ship to avoid this issue. I’ll elaborate, but basically, to avoid compiling shaders during gameplay, you want…
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a good level design tool finally came out
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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…
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a little car game i am making
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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…
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“sleight of hand” is a video game i’ve been working on
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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!
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InFlux/Redux comparison/dev thoughts video
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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
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weird west side project
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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…
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Auto Material Instance Maker Tool for UE5
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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…
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InFlux Redux is out today!
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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…
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animating while not an animator
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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…
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Dev Scoops: XCOM/2’s art direction
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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.
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my Deus Ex Lipsyncing Fix Mod: making of
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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.
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Unreal Engine Plugins That I Reckon Are Good
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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…
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the time i made headcrabs in unreal
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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…
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edsplash.bmp: a collection
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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
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game dev post: Weird West dissolvin’ walls
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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…
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blurred ball
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Finally trying the material based radial motion blur from ContentExamples (since regular motion blur is bad at things that spin). Works p well
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jedi game tech test
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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…
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here’s some pretty pictures from a game i had to cancel amid circumstances beyond my control
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map by Suzanne Will and I
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a funny thing happened when i told a lie on the internet
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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…
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Sellin’ my Light Audit Tool
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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…
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ask: porting games to the switch
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@Xuelder asked: What is the biggest technical hurdle you see when porting games to the Switch? A lot of people say the CPU, but for me it’s usually been the GPU and the limited memory. The Switch is effectively a 7 year old mid-range android phone, and it’s very difficult to get to 30fps (forget…
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ask: should tim sweeney open-source UE1
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@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…
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Ugh I Guess I Want To Move From Unity To Unreal Dot Com
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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
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unreal engine general beginner tips for persons who are beginning with unreal engine
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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…
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porting Adios To The Nintendo Switch Entertainment System
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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…
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game dev post: cooking and crafting in Weird West
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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…
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dev scoops: Fire Propagation in Weird West
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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.