Simple Value Mapping

This post is a quick one that covers a technique that I use all over the place: mapping a value from one range to a completely different range. Uses include everything from a simple health bar to mesh deformation to UI layout to shader vertex mods and tons more.

Garbage Collection and How to Avoid It

Managed languages (like C#) have often been touted as the panacea of programming. We no longer need to be concerned with memory management. Memory leaks are a thing of the past. Retain/release/delete is banashed to the bowels of hell. The garbage collector (GC from here on out) will take care of all the ugly details of memory management for us.

Interactive 2D Foliage

Having interactive foliage in your game helps bring some life to your environment. It makes everything feel more alive. There are lots of different ways to handle interactive foliage. The easiest way is to stick a trigger collider on your GameObject. When the player hits the trigger just move it back and forth on the x-axis. In this post we will go over how to kick that up a notch.

ConstantsGeneratorKit: Killing Naked Strings so You Don’t Have To

Killing naked strings? What the heck does that even mean? If you have ever worked on a large project with a medium-to-large sized team you will know exactly what I am talking about. How many times have you seen brittle code like this GameObject.FindWithTag( “SpawnPoint” ) or this someGameObject.tag == “Enemy”? Those strings are naked and afraid and they will come back to haunt you later.

Modeling 2D Water with Springs: Part 2

In part 1, all the groundwork for setting up the water simulation was laid. We have springs attached to the top verts of the water plane, which always want to remain in their neutral position. Once a force is applied to the springs they will oscillate back and forth based on the dampening and tension constants that are passed in.

Modeling 2D Water with Springs: Part 1

Water is one of those things in the world of game development that can range anywhere from incredibly simple to insanely complex. Your first attempt at making water might not be anything more than a transparent quad. Compare a solution like that with something like the water as seen in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag or Bioshock to get an idea of how far it can be taken.