A work-in-progress retrospective for my time working at T-Minus Zero…
Introduction My situation The studio The project Technology UE5, Lyra, and GAS For this project, we opted to use UE5, specifically building on top of Lyra. Personally, I found this decision to be appealing. I’ve long been interested in really leaning hard into using the Gameplay Ability System (GAS).
In the past, I’ve met some resistance from designers on adopting this system.
When I first started out on Vampyr, I was still getting familiar with Unity. I’ve been building AI in Unreal for a while, but had only dabbled with stealth AI on one particular project. I was using Game Creator for the player package, but wanted to see what I could do in C# for the AI. The results were difficult to tune and had lots of edge cases. I was focused on sketching something out, and wanted to avoid the common trap of over-engineering, which would probably have sucked the momentum out of my side project.
Another year, even more skating with the homies: Mike, Kai, Vodak, Shannon, Elizabeth, Tyler, Erik, Keegan, Savio, and Jaeson
This time we’re going global! Clips from Austin, Waco, Longview, Amsterdam, Paris, Park City, and Houston.
Thanks all for the good times and dope clips 🤙
Skateboarding with my buddies throughout 2023. Featuring clips from myself, Sam, Kai, Vodak, Tyler, Pete, Tom, Shannon, Savio, and Erik.
Today’s your day. Wachagonedu?
Demonstrating the latest in Vampyr tech and design with the first two stealth puzzles I’m prototyping.
I fixed an issue with the camera not properly handling tighter spaces. As a stealth game, the player will be moving through confined spaces to sneak around. So this was at the top of my list after I noticed it messing up in the previous encounter.
Next up was visualizing the AI vision cones.
It occurred to me that my old website had gotten pretty stale. What I was showcasing was mostly old stuff from college, and the website was minimalist even by the standards of that time. 😅
So I’ve spun up a new website using Hugo. As someone who loves Markdown and hates PHP, this framework really works for me! There’s a lot of templates to choose from, and content creation is dead simple.
A preview of the first few stealth encounters in Vampyr.
These are designed to be simple introductions to the mechanics of the gameplay. Currently this is just block out art so it’s easy to hone in the geometry and timing of the playspace before we ground it more in the game world and add in some environmental and interstitial story telling amongst the encounters.
I’ve been experimenting with Stable Diffusion’s Deforum extension for creating a living landscape painting. I’m using the following generation settings: Stable Diffusion v1.5, revAnimated_v122EOL, Deforum in 3D mode.
I’ve been experimenting with Deforum in Stable Diffusion. Using the Ink Punk Diffusion model, I rendered a background and the foreground separately and composited them. I could better replicate the camera movements in this shot using Deforum, but who’s got the time right??
I’ve been trying to figure out how to get good video effects using Deforum, but it’s been a real challenge. There’s a tension between the quality of generation for a single frame vs stability of the image over time.
Standing up the basic elements of the first chapter of Vampyr. We’re working in Unity 3D, and I’ve found basic character models - none of which work perfectly, but they get the ideas across. Similarly, I’ve got some really simple landscaping done with somewhat representative foliage and textures. The simplest version of Stealth AI I could imagine can be seen here. There’s a lot more to do to make this compelling, but I wanted to throw together something to get the gist of it.