Andrew Dowell

It's interesting to see how some video game designers are switching roles and helping to develop board games. Ever since the very first video game RPG's it was clearly understood that these developers played and referenced D&D. So it seems the more people are coming back to board games, and more of these people want to play games based on videogames. Life really does imitate Art. Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, particularly virtual ones using gamification. Game design creates goals, rules and challenges to define a board game, card game, dice game, casino game, role-playing game, sport, video game, war game or simulation that produces desirable interactions among its participants and, possibly, spectators. Academically, game design is part of game studies, while game...

As one thing finishes, another more exciting thing starts. Making the decision to leave my last job was a tough one and it's taken a few months for me to accept this (and catch up on Netflix and Breath of the Wild). Working in a dream job is a once in a lifetime experience and I learnt a lot, but it is time to use my skills and do the projects that I want to do. Now, I have the fantastic opportunity to workout where that new career path is going. Currently, I know it involves VR, Game design, 3D printing and this studio: Watch this space.

The above is a wonderful example of how great vegetation foliage can look in UE4. The above forest valley scene is by Douglas Davis. The rest of his amazing work can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gaQoZ So, this is just a quick one as it's something that I keep having to come back to but strangely not many people know about it. When adding foliage into a scene you often get a strange morphing movement effect. The first reaction is to think the animation or frame rate is to blame, but usually, this is being caused by the temporal anti-aliasing (TAA). This happens when using masked material with vertex animation as the temporal anti-aliasing reuses results from past frames and blends them together It needs a sort of history buffer with anticipation of where it will move next to have fewer artefacts. This can be achieved through the use of motion vectors. Open Project settings, Rendering, and then Optimizations. Find the tick box ...

Building a better experience in VR is an exciting process. Over the years we've found and listened to some great advice and theories about this. As the technology develops and user popularity grows, the need for better interfaces forces us to rethink traditional methods. Two great developers are Michael (designer and prototyper on the Google Daydream team) and Mike Alge with his VR Interface Design Manifesto. (Who also now works for Google) You can check out the full videos below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mcXAMDch7s https://vimeo.com/116101132 This is my collection and research of best practices for User interface in VR. User behaviour is vital when designing an interface. There are many design considerations to consider including traditional graphic design and human evolution. As a user, we all want Premium experiences. this needs to be present in all parts of our product. The title screen and interface design is often the first introd...

Thanks to the Universal Head over at The Esoteric Order of Gamers, I'm hooked on a new tabletop game. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check him out here: https://www.orderofgamers.com/ ...And I haven't even received my rulebook yet, but I'm already building miniatures. So what is this new game, I hear you ask? Gaslands is a tabletop game of post-apocalyptic vehicular mayhem. With fast and cinematic rules, it is designed to be played with toy cars, allowing players to ram, skid and race their way through the wreckage of a burnt-out Earth (or another planet). Gaslands is published by Osprey Games and is easily available on the internet. I got mine at www.bookdepository.com  as they do free shipping worldwide! For more info about the game, check it out here: www.gaslands.com After watching several videos and recently finishing a post apocalyptic VR game at work, I was in the mood to do some physical kit bashing. Although I've been playi...

I recently watched a GDC talk by Mark Rosewater and was amazed how good it was. He is predominantly talking about his experience with Magic the Gathering Card game, but the content can easily be used universally for any type of game. If you have a spare hour to learn some cool stuff, then check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHg99hwQGY Or, if you really want to get into it, then you can read the full article on magic.wizards.com: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-1-2016-05-30 Some of the points I could completely empathize with, and understand from my own experiences that sometimes being better isn't actually being better.  But a lot of them really made me scratch my head and think about game design in a brand new way. I still have a lot to learn. Here are the twenty main points he made. I'm sure this will come in handy in the future when working on the next game project! F...

Volumetric lighting is something I've been using more and more in my projects and slowly, I'm starting to get the hang of it. With each new version of Unreal some interesting updates happen. Unreal Engine recently had a fantastic session at GDC 2018 covering this. Here are the main points. The first thing you'll need to create is a simple Directional Light. This represents the direction of the light from the sun. The Skylight is the indirect lighting that gets caught in the atmosphere. It comes from all directions back into the scene. The Skylight takes a cube map from the skydome image and gives precise richer colors and more light bounces. These can be configured in the World Settings under Num Sky Lighting Bounces. Volumetric lightmaps have replaced the sparse volume lightmap system and now has many more samples and a much larger density. This can be adjusted for larger scenes in the World Settings under Lightmass. Volumetric Lighting Detail Cell ...