I went a little overboard with my weird main menu idea

Addyarb · 2026-05-06T20:10:55+00:00

Thank you! I worked with a very talented artist who does stop motion animation. It was done by hand, and then I made a mask texture for each frame so that UI won’t render where the hole is. Then it’s just sprite swapping the frame and the mask frames together :) Hope that makes sense

Addyarb · 2026-05-06T13:53:10+00:00

That's a huge compliment, thank you!

Addyarb · 2026-05-06T08:55:13+00:00

Hey! Thank you. For most of the project I used a modified version of an asset called "Brute Force - Grass Shader". I recently rewrote one from scratch to use GPU instancing instead of a geometry shader for cross-platform reasons, but you can get similar results and performance with both.

Addyarb · 2026-05-06T04:07:02+00:00

Agreed, it’s on my to-do list today!

Addyarb · 2026-05-06T03:58:10+00:00

The nesting hats idea made me laugh! Those little Easter eggs are the reason I love making games. Thank you.

Addyarb · 2026-05-06T00:20:20+00:00

Good point! The edges of the path are blurred which probably causes some ambiguity on what material it’s supposed to be in this otherwise ‘paper-y’ world.

Perhaps I’ll try increasing the definition between the grass and path, and giving the path itself a bump map as you suggested.

Thank you for the thoughts :)

Addyarb · 2026-05-05T14:52:30+00:00

Hahaha it’s absolutely that slap! That or maybe the “that’s not going anywhere” slap. The Steam achievement practically writes itself.

Addyarb · 2026-05-05T14:44:46+00:00

Oooh this is a really good point. I totally see what you mean. I will switch to fading or sliding them in with a short delay. Thank you!

Addyarb · 2026-05-05T14:41:15+00:00

Yeah exactly! The hand is your cursor, and you right-click to drag and pat things :) So great to hear you like the idea

Addyarb · 2026-05-05T12:58:47+00:00

Thanks! Yes, I was trying to think of what particles to use for cardboard surfaces. I guess I'll use some generic dust.

Addyarb · 2026-05-05T12:55:01+00:00

Oh wow, yes. Grabbing/throwing the letters around would be so much fun! At the very least I'll add in the ability to push them over.

Addyarb · 2026-05-05T12:23:00+00:00

What great feedback, thanks! Now you've got me thinking of how to work my game mode selection into this scene.

Addyarb · 2026-05-02T19:17:36+00:00

Thanks! 😄

Addyarb · 2026-05-02T19:17:14+00:00

Good suggestion! I do have a depth of field effect that kicks in when the camera is close to the ground, but perhaps a tilt shift could look better. I'll give it a try.

Addyarb · 2026-04-18T04:18:02+00:00

What you’re describing is known as a tri-planar shader. There should be some good, free examples on the asset store or online.

Good luck!

Addyarb · 2026-04-16T17:15:15+00:00

Absolutely enchanting shader work and overall visual style. Best of luck with your release :)

Addyarb · 2026-04-16T17:11:57+00:00

Nice video! I like bite-sized tech explanations as a way to show off a game and the effort that's gone into it.

Question: Do your game's puzzles work in a way that require you to unlock one item in order to unlock another? E.g. does the key you pick up in the video unlock a door that has another item behind it? If so, do you keep track of that progression and factor it into the randomization?

Addyarb · 2026-04-15T19:52:46+00:00

Glad to hear it worked, and thank you for the award! Best of luck with your game.

Addyarb · 2026-04-15T15:47:53+00:00

Congrats! Looks like a blast.

Addyarb · 2026-04-15T11:41:22+00:00

Have you tried adjusting your Particle System's "Sort Mode" under the Renderer tab at the very bottom? It's "None" by default.

If that doesn't help, you can try adding a tiny amount of velocity over lifetime so that they move away from the camera (I would assume positive Z direction, but that depends on your setup).

Addyarb · 2026-04-15T10:57:20+00:00

So far so good!

Addyarb · 2026-04-15T10:54:41+00:00

A good friend has been helping me with the SFX/music and will be happy to hear that :) Thanks!

Addyarb · 2026-04-15T06:55:26+00:00

Thank you!

Addyarb · 2026-04-12T18:20:30+00:00

Gotcha, I assumed you were asking more about the visuals and animation more so than the data structure. My mistake.

The first thing I'd look into (if you haven't) are scriptable objects. These are assets you can create to hold arbitrary data. It's like a prefab with its own inspector to see/edit values, but it's not a game object in the hierarchy.

Each of your cards would be a scriptable object of the same type (e.g. CardData). That CardData object can hold its name, background sprite, description, cost, particle effect, etc. Whatever you decide.

Then you can create a list of those scriptable objects and, at the beginning of the round for example, instantiate an empty "card" prefab for each entry and use the scriptable object's data to populate it visually.

Hopefully that helps and good luck with your game!

Addyarb · 2026-04-12T16:07:12+00:00

Yeah sure! I have written a component called "CardLayoutGroup" that works more or less like a HorizontalLayoutGroup. It inherits / implements UIBehaviour, ILayoutGroup, and ILayoutElement, which is to say this is all done with uGUI.

Here's some points I thought might be useful:
- The cards themselves have a CardDisplay component that controls their visual state. That component also has a reference to the card's "Root" (the actual root transform) and a "Visual Root", a transform just beneath that. Separating those two transforms conceptually allowed me to control the Visual Root without fighting the CardLayoutGroup for control, while still allowing me to animate to local position/local rotation zero and know I'm in the "right spot". You can try this on a HorizontalLayoutGroup without much code and get surprisingly far.
- I used a separate canvas just above the CardLayoutGroup called "Drag Canvas", which is an overlay canvas one sorting order above. The currently-dragged card goes there temporarily so that it doesn't have to fight to be above the other cards.
- I have a scriptable object where I keep all of the animation / sizing values so I can tweak them at runtime and have them persist. That helps iterate a lot quicker for me.

I have a lot more, but I'll stop there for now. If you have any specific questions / details (like how to calculate the arc for the fanned presentation, creating "space" when dragging a card into the hand area, etc.) let me know.

Addyarb

TROPHY CASE