Christer Ericson on Shader Systems

Christer Ericson, author of the tremendous book Real-time Collision Detection, talks down on Shader Graphs in a recent blog entry.

I do think the points he brings up are good, but seeing as we use a similar system around here with the same reasoning I guess I am a little biased. While they might not always make up the bulk of the problems, tackling bugs or performance issues that spring from content broken due to misused tools is always frustrating since it can feel like someone is deliberately trying to cause you headaches.

On the other hand, using tools that don’t allow you to do what you want, or even worse, do allow you to do what you whant but only in limited and weird ways is even more frustrating. I also know that to be truly creative you need to push the boundaries of the medium – even when you have to work around limitations in the tools.

I guess what I am saying is that there should be as many artists in this debate as programmers.

Posted on Aug 19/08 by Saint and filed under General game development | No Comments »

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Shadow of the Bossus

bossus1.png

… So I have been hacking away, on and off, at an experimental game engine for the last year or so, and the recent announcement of the TIGSource Bootleg Demakes competition gave me an excellent opportunity to try it out writing something real. I give you the first public images of Shadow of the Bossus.

It seems this will be a hectic month so chances are I won’t get further than finalizing the displayed confrontation, and I don’t expect to win the competition with that. Still, It’s nice to get to make something playable after such a long time of R&D.

Posted on Aug 11/08 by Saint and filed under General game development, Homegrown, Meta-blog | No Comments »

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The Art of Braid on Gamasutra

The Art of Braid

The first four Art of Braid columns by David Hellman have been posted on Gamasutra, the rest of them can still be found on his blog. Even if you don’t like the particular art-style of Braid, they are a real interesting read discussing the harmony between the visual impression and the gameplay on many different points.

I would have posted the link to them earlier, but I was kind of hoping he’d post more columns so I held it off. Other than that, I’ve been keeping busy lately and there haven’t been much time to update the blog, but there’ll be some more about that later this month, hopefully.

Posted on Aug 06/08 by Saint and filed under Gaming culture, Meta-blog | No Comments »