Updates

I've been putting together a new Unity development environment that I am calling The Maze. It is basically a playground for keeping my game-dev experiments in one place instead of splitting every idea into a separate project.

The Maze gives me a place to experiment and prototype quickly within Unity, with different input modalities and rendering styles, without creating a bunch of new projects. The goal is to find interesting gameplay systems, tools, playable slices, environments, animation setups, and other experiments, then combine the strongest parts into final projects later.

I put together a public version of my Workboard app, which I am calling Board Studio. I built it pretty quickly over a few days, using newer AI coding tools as part of the process. Stuff like this only really works well if I understand the software deeply enough to guide it properly. If I let it make too many design decisions on its own, it gets messy fast and I end up in the dark when something breaks. The upside is that once the structure is understood properly, it becomes very fast for me to add custom features, hotkeys, and workflow improvements, which is a big part of why I prefer building tools like this for myself instead of relying entirely on commercial software.

It is a Windows Electron app for organizing ideas, references, project spaces, links, media, notes, and other bits of information in a way that actually feels useful instead of cluttered. I use this kind of thing constantly, so getting a clean standalone version out in public felt worth doing.

It also connects directly to a built-in paint system, so I can do quick concepting, edits, and even some basic placeholder sprite work without leaving the app. The GitHub version is posted as its own standalone base, so if anybody wants to use it as-is or build their own version from it, they can. In my own setup I also have it tied into AutoHotKey and some other workflow tools.

The website has been rebuilt and it is in a much better spot now.

Main goal was making it easier to extend and maintain, so adding new posts, tools, and other content going forward should be a lot cleaner. It also has a new tools section now, better graphics overall, and a structure that makes more sense than the previous version.

There are still things I will probably keep adjusting over time, but this version feels like a much better base to build on. It gives me a better place to organize the assets that I develop. The tools section will also be a place for freely available tools that anybody can use.

I've spent several weeks experimenting with game ideas, figuring out what my next main project should be. Still haven't fully decided on one, but I've made some progress on many different ideas. Here are the ones worth showing off.

bithunters

bithunters is a 2D platformer co-op action adventure game. Up to 4 players can control a personified representation of a futuristic computer program and battle virtual opponents together.

Three Potions

Three Potions is a 2D mission-based hack-and-slash action game, with limited resources and challenging boss fights. I've made the Steam page for this one public, you can check it out and wishlist it here:

Castle Mournfall

Castle Mournfall is a 3D adventure game, with real-time combat, open world exploration, and an interesting storyline. By far the most ambitious of all of these projects, but I'm confident in the ideas behind it.

The current plan is sacrifice project focus to maximize development progress. And it's working pretty well so far. Once a project gets close to completion I can sprint it to the finish line. This seems to be how I work best.

Made this character about a month or so ago, rigged and textured, 70k tris. Wanted to make a realistic real time character, based on a character design of my own for a future game.

Ended up looking pretty nice, but I got a little lazy with the pants and shoes. And the hair looks kinda flat.

This week was a lot of reorganizing and adjusting, along with finally wrapping up this game I've been working on for a little over a year. Going forward I intend to focus on smaller, higher quality games with shorter development times.

As my first released 3D game, and with a ton of content, Sidereal was originally meant to be primarily a learning experience, and it fulfilled that purpose pretty well.

After cutting a ton of potential content, Sidereal is completed and will be released on Steam for free once it is approved, which should be next week.

It's a walking-simulator exploration sandbox with a bunch of narrative ideas and environmental elements. I'm not even sure how long it would take to beat, but there is an ending.

Learned a lot making this game, can't wait to apply everything I've learned for tighter, more interesting stories in the future.

But some things I envisioned a long time ago came together pretty well, and I hope people find them interesting.

That's the main project for this week, took up almost all my time. Completing and finalizing a game like this takes more than most people think. Lots more to come, though.

This was a speed sculpt I did after refamiliarizing myself with zBrush. Rendered in Blender's EEVEE, procedurally textured in Blender, and a little compositing in Krita.

Strego is a strange character that I came up with a few years ago. Mostly inspired by the Soulsborne games and some horror monsters. I have an idea for where to use it in a pretty ambitious future project.

When I first set out to make a game with 100 worlds, I thought that idea sounded cool. It turned out pretty interesting, but maybe not as fun to play as I wanted. It should be releasing for free next week or the week after, so we'll see what people think.

This week was mostly patching systems together, playtesting and bug-fixing, and calling off some content I originally wanted to add, but don't think I should spend the time on right now.

Building a unity game with tons of scenes and unique assets for 3 platforms is a huge pain though. Unity 6 and the build profiles seem promising, can't wait to use that for my newer projects.

I never minded the splash screen, but apparently some players do, so I'll probably be turning it off for my future projects. But I still love Unity above the alternatives.

Since the concept of this game is so massive, I tried to use AI in a creative way to speed up the development of some assets, some textures and icons. But I found that, while current generative AI systems can be useful for saving time, relying on it for creativity rarely has good outcomes. It always seems to fall short creatively, and I often have to spend more time correcting it than I would have just starting the idea from scratch myself. In its current form, AI is very useful for speeding up some kinds of unimportant busywork, rendering filler elements or looking up coding syntax, but knowing its limits is really important for staying productive. In the future, I don't intend to rely on current generative AI for any problems requiring creative solutions.

The r7321.art website has finally been completed!

The plan is to post updates on here every so often with details and behind-the-scenes of the projects I've been working on. I typically bounce between a bunch of things, so these posts will be a little scatter-brained.

I'll also be updating my patreon with assets that I make for my projects, alongside requests for feedback and all that good stuff. That should start next week.

I also might just give my thoughts on stuff I saw recently, anything I feel like I can uniquely add or give some value from my perspective, and I'll try to keep it concise.

So, first post, let's go.

The website turned out pretty well. It's all HTML and CSS and JavaScript. I'll make updates to it when I see value, but I'm happy with it for now. Not sure if the particles are too distracting, and I couldn't figure out a better way to align the header bar for mobile, but it works. I'll see what I can do.

Source code is on my GitHub if anyone wants to look: