Author Archives: will

This might be better if I didn’t make it on a computer

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I dig the vibes from this but there’s a few big issues:

  • The bass sounds midi as hell, like doom 1 level of computerization
  • I had trouble mixing the drums, I dug how robotic those sounded but it was hard balancing it with the lead synth
  • The Lead synth is cool as hell but really I would’ve rather a real distorted as hell guitar

Maybe I’ll go grab a crappy guitar and re-record this with real stuff to see if the problem is the lack of humanization or if it’s just a poorly thought out song in general. My bet is that once I try playing it, I’ll see some weirdness that will change the underlying song to be more of a real thing.

“We have several items for purchase!”

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I made a store stand that I’ll put a bipedal robot behind to be a shop owner. It’s currently not scaled or setup right to work. I think I’m going to make the lightbulb it’s own object that way I can swap colors on the fly. Right now I kept them in because I wanted to see what they would look like on the wire there. On the counter is a cardboard tip box and a metal lock-box.

Behind the Counter is a metal bucket (filled with what? Idk) and a generator that I’ll probably break out into it’s own object also.

In addition I wanna put a decal on the sign up top to say something like “robot killing weapons”.

Also I need to copy +paste the table a few times to make a full stand kind of thing. The proportions are definitely off so when I pull it into unreal it will be flippin’ huge. But before I do any scaling I’ll need to finalize everything on the table and fix up the wires so they’re not as blocky. Flat shading is fine but I think I can keep that vibe but put some wood texture on it for the next go around.

Grenade and stealing music to make more music

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I have a few cassettes of older music that I wanna sample and put into something in Abelton. Why use cassettes? They’re cheap as hell, this one was $4 from my local record store.

I also made this guy:

Simple enough, getting it in game went smoothly. I don’t think I want to make this a first person model I’ll probably just attach it onto the front of one of the bots to make a kamikaze bot that rushes the player.

I also spun up a quick “use” system, which is just a ray-trace off the front of the player’s camera to whatever is in front of them. Then I made a generic “usableObject” interface which receives use commands that anything can implement.

This will be the first usable thing:

Idk what it will do but my hope is to make quick chat logs when you press use, or even a buy menu.

A Fake orchestra for the real ones

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I got Abelton live 12 yesterday and it rocks, max starts up quicker, samples load quicker. Modulators are in their own subcategory. The only thing that I think kinda sucks is the tree view from the instruments is gone and replace with the tagging functionality which I personally don’t like (just because I’ve been doing the same thing since live 8).

Anyways here’s a quick thing I made using the orchestral set from Ablelton (which I didn’t realize was also available since live 7).

Also there’s native auto tune baby!

Game Stuff: New Hud and Angry Gimp usage

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I swapped out the health numbers and ammo numbers for the game. Still frame looks alright now but personally I think the ammo count size needs more work. Also the whole thing is sliding off the screen which makes me think I need to recreate the whole UI widget from scratch. The biggest accomplishment here is getting the hex pattern for that health bar. For my 2d art I primarily use GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) and gimp is usually good about having a pathway to do whatever you need. I would say around 80% of the time you can google “how to blah in GIMP” and you have 20+ years of history to rely on to get some kind of idea on how to do things. For that last 20% the solution is usually involves ripping an image from somewhere else to use as a stencil or as a basis for a built-in filter. In this case it was the latter. Gimp has filters for making a square checkerboard and diamonds but nothing for hex’s except for a “mozaic” filter. Which looks fine on paper but if you’re messing with the alpha you need very exact lines and the mozaic filter makes a pattern that includes a simulated light which annoyingly blurs the edges. However, the edges aren’t blurred by a gradient color (which can be easily fixed) but is blurred by adding a gradient to the alpha.

From here it looks fine.
Zoomed in is where troubled can be seen.

I tried everything to get rid of these edges but failed miserably: edge detection, thresholding, median blurs, contrast and color selection all seemed to maintain the gradient off the edge lines. I eventually gave up and used the suggestion from “chaz_prinz” here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/rg5wt4/creating_a_borderless_hexagon_gridpattern/ and ripped a hex pattern from the internet to generate a black/white image which I was able to use for the pattern.
I ended up with a pretty nice pattern here:

Which I threw into a filled green rectangle to get the health bar above (plus some trimming/filling around the edges). I think the result is quite nice and fits the whole old-er school vibe that I’m going for. I might make it red just to fit the obvious ascetics from every other game in existence but I figure I’d fix up the ammo up first.

Captain Jack Loop-o

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Another loop for the loop archives. The bass in the back sounds a bit like “someone great by lcd soundsystem?”

But they did it with analog synthesizers so I guess they’re better…(In addition to making full songs but let’s ignore that one).

Lean With it

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Added Leaning to the game and did some work on the reactions to different kinds of physical materials.

Gun still clips a bunch but it’s better than it was. The leaning needs more work but I figure to do that properly would require some kind of timer setup which I really don’t want to do at the moment (will add further layers to my not amazing blueprints).