Steve's Blog

February 23, 2021 Font Creation Game Text BitFontMaker 2 - Pentacom.jp Description: Online tool for building your own bit-style fonts for games. Overview This was a neat tool I saw AdamCYounis using to create their own stylized bit-style text for their game project. It appears to be straight forward to use, and allows you to build out all the individual characters for a font using a pixelized grid to design each of them. Fig. 1 - BitFontMaker2 Site Example with "A" Being Drawn

February 19, 2021 Pixel Art Color Palettes with Aseprite Title: Pixel Art Class - Palettes & Colour By: AdamCYounis Youtube - Tutorial Description: Learning about creating your own pixel art color palettes with the help of Aseprite. Overview This video covers the creation of color palettes for use in pixel art projects at an introductory level. The user is well versed in Aseprite, so they do so through this software and show some tricks within it to help in the palette creating process. They also go over some general color choosing concepts and their general process for creating palettes to give you a nice starting point. Reviewing a Palette Against the Spectrum To check how a chosen palette matches up against an entire section of a color spectrum, they copy and paste a full slice of the color spectrum (slice because the color spectrum is 3D 'i.e. R, G, and B or H, S, and V' so you can only view a particular 2D slice at any given time) into

February 18, 2021 Pixel Art Aseprite Introduction Title: An Aseprite Crash Course In 30 Minutes By: AdamCYounis Youtube - Tutorial Description: Intro to using Aesprite and some basic work flow tips. Overview This tutorial offered a great overview of the most used tools, as well as how to quickly and efficiently use them. They cover their workflow and how these tools fit into that to get you started using Aseprite effectively. Timeline This is where the layers are contained. This also holds the separate frames, which can help which creating and previewing animations. View Timeline Shortcut: Tab New Frame Shortcut: Alt + N Their Workflow Blocking (Silhouette) Shading Coloring Detailing Feature Options Pixel-perfect: Off Symmetry: Sometimes Pencil (Brush): Often round Pressure Sensitivity: Off Shading Blot several colors Eyedropper Tool Alt temporarily gives you the eyedropper tool while holding it. This lets you quickly

February 16, 2021 Dropdown and Input Field UI Architecture AI Project Renaming Items in Spawn/Target Dropdown Lists To get the spawn/target object lists into the dropdowns quickly and accurately, I had them simply add their gameobject names to the dropdowns for the individual item names. These objects however tend to have very long names as they are constructed from several elements coming from the Revit system to accurately identify them. While useful, they are too wordy for identification purposes here and can actually make them harder to find and keep track of. Because of this, we wanted to investigate a way to rename the elements in the list to make them easier to identify in the future. To accomplish this I looked to add a UI Input Field where any name could be entered and this could be used to rename current items in the dropdown lists. Since there are two dropdowns (Spawn list and Target list), I added two different buttons to account for these. One button applies

February 14, 2021 Blob Opera Machine Learning Music Toy Title: Blob Opera Google Arts & Culture - Experiment Description: Machine learning driven music generator based on opera singing. Overview This is a fun music toy created as an experiment on Google Arts & Culture. It uses machine learning from real world opera singing to drive the musical blobs. There are 4 blobs representing different singer types and they are fueled through machine learning from the singing of 4 different opera singers (bass: Frederick Tong, tenor: Christian Joel, mezzo-soprano: Joanna Gamble, soprano: Olivia Doutney). The user can drag the blobs to guide the sounds; raising the blobs up and down changes the pitch, while moving them back and forth changes the focal vowel sound they produce. Whichever blob is being controlled also guides all those lower than it when used. It's a very cool machine learning music toy that is just fun to mess around with and get acquainted wi

February 3, 2021 Gamepad Joystick Inputs Unity Title: How to Make a Twin Stick Shooter in Just 4 Hours - Unity Beginner Tutorial By: Turbo Makes Games Youtube - Tutorial Description: Full tutorial on making a simple twin stick shooter in Unity. Introduction I was mostly looking for the basics of setting up twin stick shooter input controls in Unity, mainly with how to setup the second stick, and came across this full tutorial for twin stick shooters. I can use the player controller and input setup information to cover that for sure, and having access to the rest of the tutorial can be useful for ideas and concepts if I want to help flesh out my example. Twin Stick Controls for Gamepad in Unity To setup the right joystick for a gamepad in a project such as a twin stick shooter in Unity, you go to the "Project Settings" and go to the "Input" section. Here you can modify the list of inputs Unity is dealing with, so you can add the extra

February 2, 2021 Networking Online Multiplayer Unity & Mirror Title: Let's build a 4-Player Networked Game LIVE - Online Shooter (with Mirror & Unity) By: Jason Weimann Youtube - Tutorial Description: Intro to using Mirror for networking online multiplayer play in Unity development. Introduction This tutorial has Jason Weimann implementing online network play into a basic Unity twin-stick shooting game. They use Mirror, which is a Unity asset used for simplifying the online network synchronization process. This is a live implementation where they work through many errors transferring a game from simply working locally to working with a host/client relationship. Mirror Mirror - Home Page Mirror is "a high level Networking API for Unity, supporting different low level Transports" (from Mirror themselves). It is a clean solution for implementing a quick and simple online networking option for Unity projects. The core components breakd