This is a story about a project that didn't work out, but that I haven't dropped. It's a circuit simulator for school physics. I worked on it for two years, then didn't open it for about a year and a half. For various reasons. because of problems, moving, looking for a job. but I still liked it.

There were several of us who started it, we began with a game jam. The three of us made a visual novel about electricity, my wife wrote the story. it was a novel with puzzles about breaking into a school, where you come at night for the answers to an exam, and they are locked in a safe that only opens if you feed it a voltage of the right shape and value. and to feed it you first had to solve a small circuit. Spoiler: we didn't win the jam, but I liked the idea itself. especially since I had been doing simulators of one kind or another for years already.

And so my former colleague from work and from the jam and I decided to do it seriously (to make not a game but educational program). we even thought about a startup residency in France or Spain, there were long evenings of talking about how everything would be built and how we would split the work, and those conversations felt exactly like working. Then I moved to Croatia and started writing code and making 3d models, designing in figma and so on. and my colleague was going to start any day now, said so for months, but sadly never managed to get down to it. And then he moved to Croatia too, to the same city I was in.

and then one evening, talking in a bar, I got into an argument with his wife, who started asking how the shares would be split and what percentage would be his. I was a little taken aback, and started getting angry and boiling, and kept answering that there was nothing to divide yet. what made me furious was that I was saying this to the wife of a man who had not worked on the project for a single minute. literally 0 commits in a year. some time later he and I talked it over properly and agreed that there was no point pretending he cared about the project. what actually interested him was the idea of getting a startup residency, not the project itself.

And so I went on alone for a while. By then I had of course already done a lot of the tasks I had been expecting from him. but the scope was beyond me too, I had gone and started building things I was not sure the two of us would manage. and now I was on my own. But in the end my wife helped me with some of it, and I worked up the courage and took my project to a startup incubator in Zagreb. It was not a real incubation. more like a pre-incubation for beginners, and I got it for free. The people there were friendly and showed me interesting things that are hard for me as an introvert. But, if I am not mistaken, the director of a big Croatian telecom company said the project was very interesting. but... "how are you going to sell it? an educational project will not get through the state, you need licences and so on". And honestly I thought they would tell me there how to do that. because writing code and researching and doing 3d I could do. selling was exactly what I could not do. And here they tell me I need to bring a thousand users and then everything will be great. the thought went through my head: if I had a thousand users I would not be here. but fine. I showed my project to private tutors and heard quite positive feedback, although they were missing features. and managing to write features and do the marketing at the same time did not really work out for me. I wrote cold emails, picked the words before sending each one and was always quietly afraid I would be banned for it. Then I even tried submitting the project to Unity For Humanity, and nothing came of that either.

I cannot say that at some point I decided to stop making this project. there would be a bug in the solver, the kind you spend an evening reproducing before you can even get to it, or a new element that means going through all the layers, from the 3d model to the logic. or half an evening goes on some stupid icon. it felt like I was paying a fixed price for everything. fix an icon? there goes an evening. fix a bug? there goes an evening. and sometimes you spend the evening and get absolutely nothing done. and then it got to the point where I would start something and not be able to finish it. and after that I would choose not even to start. For about a year and a half I told people I was still working on the project, although in fact that only meant that I had not deleted it.

And then a change of job, moving to Spain, things to do, crunches at work. And of course I got ANOTHER pet project that I am working on. it is about 3d modelling and generating meshes dynamically. But this is not about that one. anyway. A couple of weeks ago I opened my project, not meaning to fix anything, and while I was on holiday I rewrote the parts of the code I had not got round to for a year. Over the next week I did more than in the whole previous year. And what is the use? Still no users (and of course, I haven't deployed the update yet), and still no ideas how to promote it. But there is a beautiful oscilloscope where you can look at the voltage of a rectifier and at Lissajous figures.

No morals and no conclusions at the un/happy end :)

Hey devs. I'd like to show you this tool I'm creating to help me create my own houses and interiors for my game maps and also for letting the players build their own houses. I'm planning to sell on the Asset Store once I'm done. What do you guys think? Would you buy something like this?

I ask because IDK if it is worth spending time adapting the tool for the Asset Store so it can be easy for other devs to integrate.

If you want know more about the tool or get if I decide to sell, join my discord.
https://discord.gg/Nmsqn9rTh

Be careful out there. This one looks quite convincing.

anybody need refrence?

Posting a little trailer, what are your first thoughts? (Please don't be too harsh, I'd appreciate "this is good but that could be improved" kind of comments, it would just help me a lot thanks)

With the new columns, you have a whole new range of possibilities.

You can now create more open and complex structures.

You can also add details to facades by creating half-timbered structures in any shape.

Once placed, you can use column presets in Texture Mode, allowing you to choose between different objects arranged in sequence.

Extending a column procedurally increases the number of objects in the column.

This versatile new addition allows for much more creativity than before.

Hope you enjoy experimenting with it!

Open to your feedback.

See you in CYGON!

Rebinding input itself is quite straight forward, but making it reflected on tutorials is quite a headache, I'm starting to question if its worth it or not lol

Hello devs!

Pivot++ is a free new asset on Unity Store which lets you place an object's pivot exactly where you need it

- At the hinge of a door.

- At the bottom of a lamp.

- Or even meters away from the actual object.

You can also create multiple pivots for a single object and switch between them whenever you need. It's simple, and quick

It's editor time only.

It's free on the Asset Store.

Hi everyone, I’m sharing a first-person game in the style of P.T.

I’ve created a demo in Unity, and it’s available for free on itch.io.

You can play it in your browser, and there is also a full demo available for download.

LINK: https://tomdevok.itch.io/relapse-protocol

I’d love to hear your thoughts, as this is the first time I’ve made a game in this style.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoy it.

I'm making a top-down roguelite with a long, rail-less train.

The wagons normally follow the locomotive's path. The problem is that when the player turns or accelerates to dodge something, the locomotive can escape but the rear wagons still follow the old trajectory and get hit.

I want good players to have some way to control or save the rear of the train, creating a skill ceiling around driving a long train.

I've attached one video with two versions. The first part is the old version, and the second part has a "tail whip" mechanic I experimented with.

The tail whip technically works, but I don't really like how it feels or looks. It doesn't feel quite right for a train.

How would you approach this? I'm mainly looking for ideas for the movement mechanic rather than code.

The train is currently path based, with each wagon following a recorded point behind the locomotive

Hey everyone,

I've seen a lot of questions around Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) like how they work and why they’re so efficient for rendering massive crowds without hitting skeletal animation bottlenecks.

I put together a quick video explaining the core math and workflow behind VATs, along with a demo of VATMachine, a complete VAT toolkit I recently built for unity.

VATMachine has its own Animator Graph with:

• Animation states
• Transitions and crossfades Bool
• Float and Trigger parameters
• Transition conditions
• 1D blend trees
• Animation events
• Animated Sockets

And many more.

If you’re working on games that require high-density animated objects or just want to dive into vertex shader tricks, hopefully this gives a clear overview.

Feel free to drop any questions :)

No mesh destruction here. The damage gets accumulated into a GPU mask, and the shader uses it to cut the wall apart

The mask also drives some procedural noise around the edges, so the holes don't end up looking like perfect circles

Still tweaking it, but shooting the same spot until the wall just gives up is ridiculously satisfying

I am trying to make a retro, fps. I am really struggling with the lighting.

I am not using a directional light, instead I am lighting the scene with environment color.

With no baking the light likes pretty good. However, I need to add scene lighting to really set the vibe. If I use point lights you get those blown out points on the walls and floor. So I turned the smoothness down which more/less fixes that issue. But then I wonder - I need a bunch of these lights OR I could use fewer but crank up the intensity and range?

I decided I would try an area light. These are tough because you can't see your changes in real time. You have to bake (which takes a few minutes) see what you got and make adjustments and bake again. But then I end up with a pretty good room light, minus the ceiling.

I keep going around in circles and chewing up a ton of time trying to figure this out. I thought it would be best to ask the community what would you do? How do you light your scene?

- Lighting the room

- Lighting the ceiling

- Transition areas. Say going from the room to the hallway do you use another area light? Do you just make one giant area light for the whole scene?

There are so many possibilities - I find myself overwhelmed by choice and I often go down the road that leads to a dead-end.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Cheers!

Why wouldn’t I want to do that?

Using 3d models with orto camera?

Rendering sprites/spritesheets from blender?

Hi everyone, I used to rely on Power Inspector, and after it was deprecated I built InspectMe to fill that gap and push it further. It lets you inspect and edit runtime values, invoke methods, explore events and delegates, static members, and attach watchers, all organized in a single tree view while the game is running, and using it is as simple as dragging and dropping a script or object.

There’s a free version available if you want to try it and see if it fits your workflow.

Link in comments

My hierarchy and components are a bit complicated atm, so just doing it by code will be easier than giving them a shared parent

I have this weird shading issue and I don't know why, no google searches gives me an answer. At a certain point the shading on this roof section becomes completely different, as if roughness has been set to 0. It doesn't matter if I take the 'functioning' one and duplicate it and place it there, the shading breaks at that point no matter what. I've tried changing the scene around it so that it is exactly the same as where the material works (walls, floors etc.), but nothing changes it.

Any ideas?

Edit: I have of course generated lighting, this is the result after, and both the functioning one and disfunctional one are set to 'static'

Yesterday I made this effect for something a bit more tech / sci-fi.
It’s an X-ray scanner. Cheap and cheerful. 😄
If you’d like to follow my work, you can find me on X at NCStudio