Forem: Sunder Iyer

Ink for Game Design

Sunder Iyer — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 16:35:15 +0000

Ever since I encountered Overlap2D many years ago, I've had thoughts of engine-agnostic game development spinning in the back of my head. Overlap2D was a 2D level editor that exported game data that could be loaded into game frameworks like libGDX, HaxeFlixel, phaser.js and more. What's alluring about this is the idea that your game data is not tied to a specific game engine. In theory, this flexibility can allow you to develop your game sooner and worry about deployment later. If the need to switch game engines arises, perhaps due to licensing changes or platform support, you're safer with engine-agnostic game development strategies.

What does this have to do with Inkle's Ink? Well, Ink is a form of engine-agnostic game data creation. At heart, Ink is a narrative scripting language but because it was conceived as middleware, it can be used by many game development stacks. The primary integration is Unity which supports many platforms on its own but Ink scripts can also be run in the browser, Defold, Godot, Unreal and more. You can write Ink once, test it using Inky or Inklecate and deploy it using your desired framework. I can personally attest to running the same Ink script in the browser with ink.js and in the Defold, Godot and Unity game engines.

At first glance, Ink looks like it's just a narrative design tool, something you would use to build multi-linear stories like the ones found in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. But because of its advanced scripting features, Ink can be used for game design as well! With support for functions, variables, sets, loops and more, it's possible to simulate various games purely in Ink.

It has been said that games are all about interesting choices and what is Ink but a framework for setting up decision trees. If you're interested in learning more about Ink, I've written some articles here. Some of these include:

Making a World Map in Ink: learn how to make a navigable world
Prototyping a Card Swiping Game in Ink: if you want to make a game like Reigns, check this one out!
Testing Strategies using Inky Web Export: stress test your game's numbers using automated choices.

To conclude, Ink can be a powerful toolset for game design. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!

TIL Outro

Sunder Iyer — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:53:30 +0000

It should be apparent that this series has ended.

There are a few reasons for this but primarily, I returned to the workforce where my daily learnings are specific to proprietary projects, and I approach a weirdly gray area when posting publicly about these learnings.

Thank you to all who tuned in!
Till next time!

TIL GameCreator Ragdoll Control

Sunder Iyer — Mon, 24 May 2021 21:08:22 +0000

2021-05-24

It's often quicker/simpler/efficient to write code instead of setting up a visual script. But there's something to be said for expressing the same result in an elegant visual script. It's like a creative restriction.

To control a Game Creator Ragdoll, one can loop through and alter the rigid bodies that get auto-generated at runtime.

One could search for the rigid bodies by component but I opted to store them in a List of GameObjects on the Character itself. It's a small list of 10 objects: spine, head, 4 legs and 4 arm pieces.

Once that's done, it's just a matter of modifying the rigid bodies by looping through the list.

The Modify action applies some upward force and turns off Gravity and ensures Is Kinematic is not turned on.

The Reset action sets Gravity back to the original value.

End result:

TIL a Unity GameCreator List Trick

Sunder Iyer — Fri, 21 May 2021 20:30:21 +0000

2021-05-20

As time goes on, I'm more enthusiastic about game systems rather than game engines. And lately, I've been enamored with Game Creator.
Note: I sometimes refer to Game Creator as GameCreator (no space) or GCIO.

If you have the Shooter module, it involves the following steps.

Setup GameCreator and its Shooter module.
Build a new Ammo asset with specific properties.
Build a new Weapon asset that uses this Ammo asset.
Add a game object with a Character Shooter that can Draw the Weapon and Shoot it.

I flesh out these steps in more detail in my docs but what I learned today that was rather interesting was that you can pick a random value from a List very easily in Game Creator. This is very useful for moving objects for quick tests or otherwise inducing predictable behaviors.

Eyy I forgot to hit publish :[

TIL Chromebook Linux Launcher Creation

Sunder Iyer — Thu, 20 May 2021 01:23:32 +0000

2021-05-19

Previously I set my Chromebook to run Godot but I didn't like opening terminal to run it and would rather have a pinned icon to launch Godot. Debian Packages installed from Chrome's Files have such shortcuts created automatically but AppImages don't. To make a launcher for an AppImage, it's necessary to make a .desktop file and place it in a specific folder.

One way to make a .desktop file is to open the Text app and write the descriptions by hand.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Godot
Comment=Great Game Engine
Exec=/home/goldenxp/apps/godot33
Icon=/home/goldenxp/icons/godot-icon.png
Type=Application
Categories=Development;Graphics;Game

There are other options one can take advantage of like keywords and terminal display, etc.

When you're satisfied, you need to save the file in a specific location so that it's picked up by the Chrome OS Launcher. Read here for some info on this. The location I'm going to use is ~/.local/share/applications/. It's hidden by default so when you want to save it, you'll need to show hidden files.

Once you save it, it should take a couple of seconds for it to show up in the Launcher. Now you can click to launch and even pin the app to the shelf.

Note: I've noticed that some .desktop edits don't register updates in Chrome. The workaround is to delete the .desktop file and remake it.

TIL to Set Unity Quick Search Priority

Sunder Iyer — Tue, 18 May 2021 01:01:09 +0000

2021-05-17

My user interface err usage(?) style tends to be mouse-averse. As an example I prefer using Quick Launcher UIs to clicking around menus and submenus.

So once I discovered it, I used Unity Quick Search a bit. But I noticed that most of my frequently needed commands were at the bottom of the list. This is because the default order of providers favors assets first. For me, this meant editor icons and other cruft were given priority first. Fortunately this is easy to reorder under Preferences > Quick Search.

Just click the up and down buttons as needed. Favorites, I suppose, can also be used for similar effect but this seems to work for me...for now.

TIL Some Game Dev Options for Chromebooks

Sunder Iyer — Fri, 14 May 2021 00:29:45 +0000

2021-05-13

Chromebooks can run both Android and Linux apps, the former (if I recall correctly) is enabled out of the book but the latter needs to be setup. It's rather trivial, though. Just go to Settings, search "Linux" and click the first "Turn on" button you see.

As an example, you can now download Godot, copy it using the Files app to a desired location in Linux Files and run it using the Terminal app.

Linux apps like GB Studio are even simpler to setup with Chrome OS allowing direct installation through the right-click menu.

The nice thing about this installation process is you can pin the app to your shelf and invoke it without opening Terminal.

But what I discovered today was ... you could actually run Windows executables using Wine.

So as an example, I grabbed portable Notepad++ and extracted it to a win folder in Linux Files. With wine installed, it was possible to run the Windows executable with a quick command.

TIL DOOM 3 Source Compilation

Sunder Iyer — Tue, 11 May 2021 23:55:14 +0000

2021-05-11

For fun, I decided to check out id Tech 4. Instead of using id's repo, I was turned on to RBDOOM 3 which is a modern version. Fortunately, I found this guide which made my life 100x easier.

Following the guide, I cloned the master branch (using GitHub Desktop). I had Visual Studio 2019 already installed which fortunately RBDOOM 3 supports. The next step was to install cmake which I found here. I deviated from the guide and didn't use msi, opting for the zip version. This meant I had to ensure cmake's bin folder was in my PATH variable.

Then I generated the solution using one of the existing batch files, opting for cmake-vs2019-64bit-windows10.bat.

Deviating a little from the guide once more, I skipped ahead and immediately opened the RBDoom3BFG solution generated in the new build folder which opened up with no issues in VS2019. Without changing anything, I built the solution and this produced an RBDoom3BFG.exe in a Debug folder. Attempting to run this produced missing DLL errors which I took note of.

Returning to the guide, I jumped to the step I skipped and grabbed ffmpeg-4.4-full_build-shared.7z from gyan.dev. The necessary DLLs are in the bin folder which I placed alongside the RBDoom3BFG.exe file:

avcodec-58.dll
avformat-58.dll
avutil-56.dll
swresample-3.dll
swscale-5.dll

Or you could copy all the dlls like the guide suggests.

Upon running the game, I ran into the same error as the guide depicted and instead of copying just default.cfg, I copied the whole RBDOOM-3-BFG\base\ folder into my Saved Games folder.

Finally it was time to ensure the game assets were available to the build. The game's on sale right now on Steam. Install the game and find its base\ folder where all the assets reside. The guide suggests copying it but I used junctions instead. Using junctions would mean that I can potentially ruin my game files but since I don't intend to play the game it should be okay.

Unfortunately after all this, DOOM 3 still didn't run. I got this error.

It turns out that the game tried to run with my system's integrated graphics processor which does not support OpenGL 4.5 which RBDOOM 3 now needs. Indeed, it complained about failing to make OpenGL 4.5 contexts and falling back to OpenGL 4.3. Fortunately I was able to specify which GPU to use.

Upon changing to the better graphics card, the game finally ran. I loaded up a dev map.

Rip and Tear, anyone?

TIL How to Access Emoji Easily

Sunder Iyer — Tue, 11 May 2021 00:58:00 +0000

2021-05-10

It's often hellacious to use multiple communication apps that all have different emoji support. Also sometimes I like to use icons like ✅ and ⚠ in my documents/checklists and often resort to memorization of numpad codes or opening up a browser and copy/pasting from emojipedia (or whichever hit pops up first in my search engine of choice).

Luckily on my Windows 10 OS, I can hit Win key + ; and it pops up an emoji helper that supports search and recently used emoji.

Less headache, more expressiveness.

TIL AssetDatabase Ops

Sunder Iyer — Wed, 05 May 2021 01:44:39 +0000

2021-05-04
May the fourth be with you

So I exported a SGB project to Unity and needed to change all the shaders on the exported materials. This is a tedious task to do by hand especially when there are many materials --- but fortunately, Unity makes Editor Scripting easy and you can perform batch operations on assets easily.

I learned about the AssetDatabase and how you can use it to find and manipulate assets. I slapped together a scriptable-wizard that takes two shader values and runs through all materials in the project and swaps the first with the second. This lets me target shaders that I know can be replaced properly.

using UnityEngine;
using UnityEditor;
using System.Collections;

public class Wizard : ScriptableWizard
{
    public Shader target;
    public Shader replacement;

    [MenuItem("Batch Ops/Wizard")]
    public static void SetWizard()
    {
        ScriptableWizard.DisplayWizard("Some Batch Op",typeof(Wizard),"Swap Shaders");
    }

    void OnWizardCreate()
    {
        string[] guids =  AssetDatabase.FindAssets("t:material");
        foreach (string guid in guids)
        {
            string path = AssetDatabase.GUIDToAssetPath(guid);
            Material material = (Material) AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath(path, typeof(Material));
            if (material.shader == target)
            {
                material.shader = replacement;
                Debug.Log("Replaced shader in " + material.name);
            }
        }
        AssetDatabase.SaveAssets();
        AssetDatabase.Refresh();
    }
}

The following wizard shows up when I access it from the top menu.

Fortunately, the script ran with no issues and I was able to avoid tedious shader replacement. I'm sure it's prone to errors but I'll deal with those as they happen.

TIL CSS v* units

Sunder Iyer — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 01:10:31 +0000

2021-04-15

When games and browsers combine! I'm displaying text for a web visual novel using TuesdayJS and I'm running into font visibility issues on some devices.

Fortunately CSS has some useful units that work relative to the viewport! There's

vw - 0.01x of the viewport width
vh - 0.01x of the viewport height
vmin - 0.01x of the smaller of the two dimensions
vmax - 0.01x of the greater of the two dimensions

So far using a font size based on the vmin gives me a result that seems to work nicely on different screens.

TIL Xbox UWP Basic Fixes

Sunder Iyer — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 05:31:11 +0000

2021-04-06

There are two basic issues when you output a Unity game to Xbox as a UWP application. The first one is the visible white edges (tv overscan) and the second one is the mouse pointer.

Most of the official docs describes solutions for C# XAML but Unity only supports IL2CPP for UWP builds.

To address this change, you need to edit app.xaml.cpp instead.

App::App()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    Application::Current->RequiresPointerMode = ApplicationRequiresPointerMode::WhenRequested; // mouse mode off
// 
void App::InitializeUnity(String^ args)
{
    ApplicationView::GetForCurrentView()->SuppressSystemOverlays = true;
    ApplicationView::GetForCurrentView()->SetDesiredBoundsMode(ApplicationViewBoundsMode::UseCoreWindow); // overscan fix