Monthly Archives

April 2017

Apr 23
0

The Main Event – Procedural Level Generation in Unity for M.E.R.C.

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Graham Davis, now at Kixeye, came to talk to us about the procedural level generation system he created in Unity for TinyMob Games‘ M.E.R.C. His talk went over why procedural level generation was used in M.E.R.C., how it was implemented, the design and technical problems that were overcome, and how it turned out (spoiler: pretty cool!). For me the most surprising part of the talk was learning just how much custom art and modelling there is in a generated level – it would be great if you could tell the computer what to do and call it a day, but sadly that’s not how it actually works. An enormous amount of work goes into creating building blocks for your levels that your level generation code can assemble for you so that all the pieces look good together.

Graham was kind enough to share his slides, if you missed his talk you don’t have to miss out! If you’d like more detail than is in the slides, Graham also wrote a two part blog about it on Gamasutra: part 1, part 2.

Thanks again to Graham for telling us all about procedural level generation!

Apr 02
1

The Main Event – Shaders in Unity

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For the March Main Event Dylan Gedig of Red Nexus Games came to talk to us about shaders. If you look at what wikipedia has to say about them, they sound intimidatingly complicated. But as Dylan showed us, they’re really not that scary. Not only are shaders not just for wizards, you can use them to effectively add more art to your game without an artist having to do more work or making the download size of your game bigger. If you need a grayscale version of, say, a player character that isn’t selected, plus the normal full colour version, plus a flashing red version for when the player gets attacked, you can do all of that with one piece of art and some shaders.

To see how, have a look at Dylan’s slides and his example project.

Thanks again to Dylan for demystifying shaders!