Unleash the power of physical animations
I’ve always loved how some games use animations that seem to generate naturally depending on the environment. Like how in Uncharted Nathan uses his hands to explore nearby objects when you pass by, or how in GTA you get these amazing reactions to collisions.
So, I started investigating procedural animation systems and came across a technique called physical animations, also known as active ragdolls. The concept is actually pretty simple, make a ragdoll try to match an animation by applying forces to its body parts. …
Maximizing your sound capabilities through FMOD
Unity sound engine offers decent performance for most projects, but it falls short when looking for more advanced audio features. With this project, we aim to mix the power of FMOD Studio with Unity’s physics engine.
The shortcomings of Unity’s audio engine
This is a project I made some years ago with a colleague of mine. The idea was to make a tool to synchronize Unity’s physics with FMOD, allowing users to take full advantage of the latter’s audio capabilities.
You can find the source code here. …
How to generate profit by abusing the player’s psychology
Since I was little, I’ve always loved videogames. I spent many hours of my childhood living the adventures of iconic characters. I traveled with Commander Shepard across many galaxies. I enjoyed the charismatic envisioning of a post-nuclear war civilization with the Fallout franchise. I developed a competitive mindset after playing almost all of the relevant competitive games of the past decade (perhaps more than I should, I must admit).
All of the games I’ve enjoyed at some point had something in common: they added some value to my life. …
GAME DESIGN ETHICS
Creating experiences to be enjoyable is one thing, but building mechanics that deliberately exploit addictive behavior is another
Well, that’s kind of tricky question. Video games were born to be fun. Their origin lays in the sheer curiosity of the engineers that made them. They asked themselves whether they could make something fun from the boring machines of their time. And yes, they could.
But origin means nothing. Computers were made for processing data, but we now mainly use them for communication. Phones were made to make calls, and we now use for…well, everything. Every invention has its first use, but only in rare cases it remains the sole one as time goes on.
Games don’t have to…
