Chronicles: Game Development, Game Engines & Retro Futuristic Steampunk Musings.

No dev updates for 15 months!

I couldn’t quite believe the last update on here was December 2020, so will have to get back in the habit of at least monthly posts (not that I believe many or probably any people read these to be honest – but it is a chronicle of sorts for me). A lot of development work…

11 April 2022
Underwater Caustics

I subscribe to several guys building game engines that use youtube to showcase their work – the ‘Wicked Engine’ being one of my favourites, there are prolific updates that often show cutting edge game engine rendering. Recently a video popped up showing underwater caustic simulation and it is actually a pretty good case of ‘fakery’…

22 March 2022
HBAO – Ambient Occlusion

Last year I looked at SSAO techniques (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and a fellow game developer mentioned HBAO to me (Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion). As post processing screen based effects are often the most rewarding to work on I thought I would investigate HBAO compared to SSAO. I found that there was a significant improvement…

19 March 2022
Game Engine User Cameras

In-game cameras – that the game developer can use to render scenes to textures, that are also within game (diegetic) are useful for such things as player portals, mini-maps, rear view displays in cockpits and the like. Clearly using too many of these type of cameras will affect performance and FPS drops are likely as…

12 February 2022
Mars Helicopter – ‘Ginny’

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. To celebrate this spectacular feat of engineering I built a simulated ‘flight number 2’ within Unreal Engine 4. And of course Ginny at some time later found the Cavor sphere on her travels on Barsoom: [note…

20 April 2021
Which Game Engine for Cogwheel Chronicles ?

For several years the Cogwheel Chronicle Universe (CCU) has been built out using a custom engine (for fun I came to call it the ‘Cogwheel Engine’) that evolved from the Game Guru engine source code that Lee Bamber of ‘The Game Creators’ company made available on GitHub. I rewrote parts of the engine and totally…

2 December 2020
Western Steampunk

The Wild West (or ‘Weird West’) has always been a part of the steampunk ethos. The two major historical steampunk conceits are ‘retro futurism’ within bothVictorian England and Wild West America. And as such Cogwheel Chronicles embraces both of these concepts within its game world. Early concept work for the weird wild west:

7 November 2020
Victorian England Steampunk

A call to an age of retro simplicity with the promise of so much more …

3 October 2020
Steampunk Airship Aerobatics

What is the best game play dynamics for the control of an airship for both combat and exploration purposes? That’s the exam question presently being wrestled with:

13 September 2020
Video Catch-up

31 August 2020