Telltale have been very busy lately, in-between signing deals with Netflix and tussling with their former CEO. The studio that (gradually) popularised episodic games has a lot on their plate, and now they've got a pretty heavy dessert lined up for once they've finished the upcoming fourth and final Walking Dead game season. According to anonymous sources speaking to Variety (and somewhat supported by job…
Unity
3 years ago
My earliest memories of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall were of fear and excitement at the boundless possibilities of a true fantasy sandbox. Of amazement at the most comprehensive character creation screen I'd ever seen, and of deep annoyance when I managed to fall through the floor and into an endless void in the first minute of the game.I've spent over twenty years waiting for…
5 years ago
Unity's latest swish tech demo is Adam, a sci-fi short story about a naughty robot in a nasty future. It's quite pretty! They plan to release a downloadable version for folks to run on their own computers, but right now you can watch the whole thing right here:
Fancier, more realistic reflections will come as standard in Unity's next major version (screen-space raytraced reflections, if you want to get technical), and we should probably pay more attention to the engine considering it's almost everywhere nowadays. So here, let's come coo over how nicely light reflects around a bedroom in this newly-released tech demo. You can download it to have a fiddle on your…
Feature: And it's worth celebrating.
Global illumination. Volumetric clouds. Sub-surface scattering.These are words that make me hot.But I know this feeling is forbidden. I should care about games, not the empty pursuit of photorealism. But oh my, it’s so exciting, and not empty. In fact, I think that right now photorealism is becoming crucial to games, and that we should celebrate it.
6 years ago
If you use Google's web browser Chrome, you might notice that Unity games embedded in web pages no longer work as of the latest update. As they've planned to since 2013, Google have disabled support for the way the Unity plugin works. Unity 5 does support WebGL, which works without plugins, but for now that'll leave a whole load of browser games not working. You…
I'm at a Unity [official site] special event at GDC and I've had a donut for breakfast. Take everything I'm writing below with a pinch of the sugar rushing through my veins, but Unity have just announced that Unity 5 is available to download now and that there's a free, no-royalty Personal Edition for use by small companies. There's a livestream of the event and…
Here's something rather natty. Some clever sort has created a thing called Daggerfall Tools for Unity. They describe it as "a code asset which acts as a bridge between Daggerfall's binary data files and Unity3D."What this essentially seems to mean is that if you own a copy of Daggerfall - which Bethesda offer as a free download, bless 'em - you can use Daggerfall Tools to…
Thursday is, as ever, Business Thursday here at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. We're wearing ties, playing Footsie, and folding that pretty pink newspaper into paper planes. It's 12 o'clock, which means it's now time for the RPS #business#noonblast brought to you by Millson's Tie Clip Polish. Millson's! Don't let tarnish tarnish your reputation.Business is afoot at engine makers Unity. Co-founder David Helgason has stepped down as…
Ooh he isn't half an awful gossip, that Ian Video Games! Why, just the other day our Alec said Judith's lad CNET -- you know, shaved head, earring, works in the arches café -- told him Ian had been going around saying Google and some other local teams had been sniffing around, looking at signing up Unity. "Unity!" I tell Ian, "It's you wot needs…
As in, the whole bally company. Clearly anyone's been able to buy a copy of the engine for yonks.Unity is the go-to gamemaking tool for a vast number of developers, big and small (around three million of 'em, in fact, with Blizzard's Hearthstone its highest-profile title, at least until one of my games comes out), and it was perhaps only a matter of time before…
7 years ago
Feature: Dark Horizons
This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.Somewhere in the region of the demoscene and modern game jam is Noctuelles, home of mysterious New Zealander Orihaus and the 'strange places' he calls 'games'. Ghostly ‘megastructures’ of stark, sometimes procedurally generated geometry, his Unity-powered projects can seem a million light…
In theory I'm working with someone to make a game in Unity, but I've yet to progress past the "very long Word documents with overwritten design ideas" stage myself. However, at some point I fully intend to fiddle under the hood to some degree, and as such today's news of a big old update to Unity is going to affect me at some point. For…
8 years ago
Left a bit. Too far! Right. Right. RIGHT! Oh sorry, I didn't see you there. I was just practicing telling Wasteland 2 developers inXile what to do with the assets I'm ready, willing, and prepared to generate for Wasteland 2. And because I'm lovely and like to share these things, I'm going to tell you how you can be in the position to have a…
9 years ago
Hey, developers! Erm. Just wanted to say hi, like. Also, you might be interested in the next version of the increasingly ubiquitous Unity engine, which is toting all sorts of hypermodern features (they even say 'hypermodern' themselves in their press release, so for once I'm not to blame for a superlative-based portmanteau) aimed at making it desirable to indies, mainstream, mobile and mucking-about devs alike.DirectX…
I thought writing about else { Heart.break() } would prove to be a novelty, but three days later here I am, telling you about another game that lets you fiddle in its innards. I am now the official RPS expert, sorry "expert", on games that allow you to alter their code: Code Hero is a Unity engine game where you have a code gun that…
10 years ago
Yikes! This is the most impressive Unity-powered project I've seen to date. BeGone is a butter-smooth, not-at-all-ugly multiplayer FPS you can play right out of your browser. Click on the link, pick a server, wait some seconds and you're off, engaging in hot manshoots with up to 11 other players. You hear that? That's the sound of the past crunching under the heavy boot of…
While not exactly about playing games (this is more for the making of games) the launch of Unity 3, the third iteration of the free-to-use game engine, has me excited. Of all the game-making tools out there, Unity is the one I've spent the most time with, and it was actually responsible for the RPS game, RockPaperShotgunity, which we cobbled together last year. Also, I…
A Friday afternoon distraction here. Langman is really just a conceptually pure thing. It's a unity-powered combination between the word-game hangman and a platformer, so you have to jump between the letters to select them. Fall to your death, and you lose a guess. Guess wrong and you lose a guess. Guess right, and you may add another guess. Battling against my (perhaps predictable) intrinsic…
11 years ago
Continuing my march through the tips folder, I hit upon Nir Gooday - and his brother's - game. It's Minesweeper. In 3D. It's 3D Minesweeper. Which is the sort of thing which strikes you as totally pointless... but then you realise there's a spark of genius here. There's something oddly compulsive of taking that step. I mean, it's become such a social staple that we…
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