Instead of trying to fill out a blog post for each of them, I've decided to dump a whole bunch of these projects into this one Super Duper MegaPost (tm). Not everything made the cut, obviously. To be honest, most of my projects get deleted after I give up on them, so some stuff really is lost forever. Again, as a disclaimer, many of these projects are still embarrassing to look at for all the usual reasons. They're old, and I didn't know what I was doing yet, and blah blah blah. They represent my first five-ish years of learning, messing up, and starting things I obviously couldn't finish. I figure that learning from your mistakes is cool and all, but learning from other peoples' mistakes is even cooler - so I'll post them here anyway.
Plus I didn't only make mistakes. Sometimes I made stuff that was almost sort of interesting.
Oh, and in addition to this mega-post, I'll be uploading my game jam submissions separately, since they at least represent "finished" projects. So keep scrolling down to see those.
And now, on with the show:
At one point in the somewhat recent past, I found out that I could re-live my childhood dream of beating Super Monkey Ball 2, with the help of an emulator. After about half an hour though, I gave up on the dream again, because I realized it would be more fun to implement the mechanics and screw around in UE4. We actually developed this into a fun little game concept, where you can morph between a few different shapes, each of which has different movement mechanics and physical properties.
Anyway the morphing uses basic blend shapes (morph targets in UE4), although the bouncing deformation in the second video is just a material effect. The movement itself, along with the bounce physics, were tricky to implement. I didn't want to rely on the physics system to move around, since it's inconsistent and a bit unreliable at high speeds; So I wrote a custom character controller in C++, and made a vague attempt to properly compute the bounce forces for the soft body. I keep promising myself that someday I will revisit the concept, becuase it really would be a cool game.
I've played a fair bit with splines in UE4 over the years, and there are two main challenges. The first is that a spline can have many points, but a spline mesh can only have two. You always have to hack together a system that skins a spline with an array of meshes, which is a bit of a pain. The second is that I swear somewhere in the implementation is a rotation normalization bug, because the only reliable way to control spline roll without introducing kinks as you cross coordinate axes is to compute the roll manually. Anyway, I was playing with an ability that would grow vines over stuff, and it worked reasonably well.
Coincidentally, for the same project, I got to dive in and play a lot with character control and movement abilities. This is easily my favorite part of gameplay programming; I'm fascinated by movement systems in platformers, and "skill-based" modes (like surf and bhop in Source Engine games). I tuned the movement to be pretty fun, extended the player controller with niceties like crouching/sliding/sprinting, and also added a couple of dash abilities:
At one point I decided to do ocean water, for some reason (The reason was that it is very fun). There are a few methods, of varying complexity, and I pretty much implemented them all. The prettiest one uses a compute shader for FFT, to generate textures for offset, gradient, and folding. I want to stress that I did not write the FFT shader, although I spent hours and hours in my university library trying to wrap my head around the math. I just adapted an old UE4 plugin (like, version 4.2 old) that handled the FFT. My actual goal was to read back the displacement texture to compute buoyancy on the game thread, but at the time I didn't know enough about the rendering pipeline to make that happen.
A little known fact is that since Minecraft came out, every novice engine programmer goes through a voxel phase. I was no exception, and at some point I got super into runtime terrain meshing. I used the Runtime Mesh Component plugin to do your basic metaballs example with marching cubes. That plugin was super interesting, and I was sad when it stopped being maintained. Thankfully though, it has since been resurrected, and now has made some seriously cool improvements; I really want to poke around with it again sometime. Oh and the holes in the mesh are just where it clips the simulation bounds, that's not a bug in the meshing.
Just like every engine programmer goes through a voxel phase, every novice tech artist goes through a toon shading phase. This one is a pretty standard post-process effect for outlines and cel shading. In hindsight, this sort of effect is extremely wasteful; UE4 does a tremendous amount of work (and uses a tremendous amount of video memory) for the PBR pipeline, and this effect throws most of that work away. I've since done the same effect with what I think is a better approach, involving a custom shading model for the engine. The new one also supports all light types (not just directional), and handles shadows more gracefully. Regardless, I actually made a YouTube tutorial for the older effect (on top of the pile of existing ones), which was full of bad, wrong information, but someone took it and made a short film with it, which was awesome!
In addition to all the UE4 stuff, I've started and then abandoned countless graphics engines, usually built around the Vulkan or D3D12 APIs. Invariably, I get far enough along to realize that actually I've structured things poorly, and then I start again. I do get a bit further every time though, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. Here's a couple random examples of old and dead engines, none of which do anything remotely remarkable:
OK this is getting far too long, and there are so many more dead projects to talk about, but they just get less and less polished from here. Instead of padding out this post any further, I'll drop a couple of unlisted YouTube links, which are mostly just me talking through some internal tools stuff, or showing other team members what I've been up to. These were never meant for public eyes, so consider it a "behind the scenes" look, from years ago when I didn't know what I was doing (I still don't, but hey).
- Talking about sculpting rocks
- Old ocean water
- Some character animation stuff (stock animations, but custom models/particles)
Finally, here are some fun extras presented without context:
