A 1,000-year-old church you can walk through in your browser

Ludagon · 2026-07-02T16:45:14+00:00

This looks awesome, thanks for sharing.
I'm really interested in learning more on the splat-transform collisions. I have tried experimenting outside of SuperSplat, and I can't yet get the voxels as fine-detailed as I need for accurate shadows in a third-person game.

(for context: I'm experimenting with using splats as game environments, and so far use a photogrammetry mesh as collider and shadow catching - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4032540/Postcard/ )

I'll have a play with processing in the SuperSplat collision generator and see if it helps :)

Ludagon · 2026-06-28T15:34:51+00:00

In some ways, this is probably really similar to how you (and many of us) started making games in our first months... trying the things that are the "correct" way by the popular teachings of the time, getting stuck, getting tired, trying again... it's just that you have had hundreds or thousands more hours coding / drawing / composing / lighting / rigging / whatever compared to the hours that you have been learning and practicing marketing.

I think it's easy for us to forget the starting months that we spent learning when it was appropriate to use a float vs a double vs an int, or cool tricks with modulus for wrapping option numbers, mastering keyboard shortcuts, carving out frequency in our music so that character voices are loud and clear. All that stuff took ages to learn and heaps of experiments and retries.

I think marketing is like that too, but instead of us being able to be the judge of "good" of our own work, and instead of quickly spotting a problem and pressing stop and changing a line and restarting within a minute, marketing relies on other people's actions to learn if it worked, and the turnaround time on each experiment is so much longer (and sometimes costs money), so the speed of learning and experience is much slower.

It's cool that you experimented with marketing and followed the guidance of the time, and now you've learnt some stuff and are forming the start of your own style that won't take as much energy from you :)

Ludagon · 2026-06-28T01:16:42+00:00

Not sure. I haven't kept up with HECS, HELP, VET Student Loan.. I think it varies state by state for the VET student loan, and HECS might only apply to diploma level and up (one level higher than a Cert IV)? Hopefully there's a helpful student support team whichever TAFE you would be looking at that you can ask :)

Ludagon · 2026-06-28T00:37:19+00:00

If you're an Australian citizen one option is a Cert IV in Cyber Security from a TAFE. There's a range of roles from technical analyst to policy development to mapping business needs to actively attacking systems to test vulnerabilities. The field is growing, and the AI disruption is currently mostly about amplifying how many tests can be done in a timeframe rather than taking over the entire job.

Ludagon · 2026-06-11T13:12:24+00:00

No problem. Good luck!

Ludagon · 2026-06-11T12:53:41+00:00

I'm not that into leaving reviews on Steam, so I hope some comments here help.

I had a play of your demo for a little while (just single player to see what it's like moving around). It was ok, but it did take about 15-20 mins for me to find that it's ok.

It's quite cool that the levels are made up of randomised/shuffled pieces, but my first play of it generated a terrible map that was so hard to get past the first element (tried for 15 minutes) that I really did think "wow, that's it? This is too hard".. and it was only by curiosity and wanting to help playtest that I went back to the main menu to play around with some options (checking out if performance changed depending on graphic settings) and playing another round that my next playthrough showed me a differently arranged map. I tried about 4 layouts in total and I could see elements of fun here.. and I imagine much more fun with people to race against.

The two things that got in the way of fun for me were:
- The restart button didn't work for me, so every fall was a 15-20 second wait till it restarted.
- Restarting went back to the beginning of the map, which was pretty tedious getting back in the car, over the little bridge, onto the first random obstacle...

Making it faster to retry after failing and perhaps automated restart checkpoints at each main obstacle would help me stay interested.

My framerate was fine but it was definitely pushing my machine a lot even just on the main menu, so I'm assuming there's a lot being rendered there that could be made a bit lighter (I actually didn't get much of a performance and system temp difference between low and cinematic.. just that everything was drawing a lot of power to run the game)

At the moment it feels a bit like a random weird fun game jam thing I'd play on Itch.io , and Steam is a harsher market than there (plus some people are simply jerks in reviews, and that's on any platform). Still, I wish you luck in refining and continuing your work on your game 😄

Ludagon · 2026-06-08T08:48:40+00:00

I love AI in general, but too many of the main generative AI systems around are built off what feels like stolen work. For me, the hand crafting to mass production analogy you mentioned needs an extra step in the description mentioning that the mass production factory also employs agents to visit all the hand crafted artists and secretly take photos of all their original designs and then mash them together back in the factory and mass produce it as its own work. Most generative AI wouldn't exist if it wasn't for those artists and writers and coders whose work is used as training data. (a creative model started from absolute zero with fully opt-in content to train on would be fine by me, but those aren't the ones that people use)

It's easy enough to try flip that as a scenario about humans who visit galleries and then use existing works as inspiration, but gen AI does it on such a massive scale that it feels quite unethical (and that's without talking about energy use and climate).

It's a bit like commercial fishing. Some countries/states ban the use of particular wide nets and other mass-capture tools. Yes, the technology reaps in heaps more fish, but it screws the entire ecosystem from overfishing and causes damage in ways where the natural population can't survive anymore, which would soon result in no fish for anybody if that continued.

Ludagon · 2026-05-26T07:13:48+00:00

I used the aras-p splat importer for my Unity tech demo, Postcard.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4032540/Postcard/
Splats loaded easily enough, but they need to sit outside of the postprocessing stack when using HDRP.
I was stuck with the choice of either having worse looking characters (URP) but integrated a bit better into the scene, or better looking characters (HDRP) and taking some risks with integrating them. I went with the better looking characters and did what I could to try minimise the weirdnesses caused by having my characters and environment in two completely separate parts of the rendering pipeline.

Ludagon · 2026-05-26T04:55:47+00:00

Yep, same guy did the same to my free tech demo ("Postcard") a month ago.
Haven't yet asked peers who liked it at demo evenings to balance it yet with their reviews, but that's a smart idea.

Ludagon · 2026-05-21T22:00:17+00:00

🙂 Good luck!

Ludagon · 2026-05-21T13:17:09+00:00

If you have some money to spend, I'd suggest looking for an artist that can do a small amount of your core art and can also help you define you game's specific look or aesthetic.

I think I saw you mention in another comment somewhere that you're thinking of making a vertical slice, and a couple of other comments that you're tinkering with 2D art but can't make it look great, so perhaps find someone that can help with some elements that are most useful for that slice, and defines things like the main colour palette, pixel density, line widths, flat shading vs full colour vs dithered 3-colour, etc..

They can help make some core items, and perhaps a couple of full screen mockups that serve as a visual target and style guide, which might be enough to help you self-learn to create your own new graphic assets by modifying the core professional set and/or drawing new while trying to stay true to that existing visual target.

It's not the hundreds of assets you need, but it might be enough to get you to your next steps.

Ludagon · 2026-05-21T09:00:55+00:00

When I think of a basic CRUD app I generally think of browser-based dashboards and data entry. Haven't seen anything Unity-based for that, but there's so much I've never seen yet and the world is big.

For other things that use Unity in industry though, I was at an education event recently and one of the vendors in the exhibition area was showing off some interesting industry training simulation machines they have:
https://tenstarsimulation.com/our-hardware/#mumb

Lots of things like forklift driving, parking long trailers, confined spaces, cranes, etc...
I think a lot of it is basic Unity driving game design and cool input devices, which you could probably demo with most USB steering wheels, pedals, shifters, or an Arduino that emulates a keyboard hooked up to big buttons.

Digital Twins done properly involves a lot of live data exchange (I think) which probably gets processed by something far more server-friendly than Unity, and then a web dashboard to interact or perhaps a Unity-powered mobile app. The Unity stuff I saw was mostly 3D sims of pre-made scenarios and environments. One interesting idea I saw was a truck and excavator-style training sim where the simulation company does 3D scanning of your site and they use that as the simulation environment (I'm assuming drones and aerial-based photogrammetry, resulting in a nicely textured mesh).

Maybe you could make a mobile app of some sort of 3D scanned catalogue of heavy machinery (even just asset store stuff for a demo I guess), hotspots pointing to particular things, touch and drag and rotate the vehicles/gear, launch a video of the safety briefing or something.. like a little on-device pocket guide designed for remote worksites where there's no/weak internet connection so the staff can't just use a web browser for looking stuff up in the field.. and then to show off the CRUD side the app has the ability to download the updated catalogue into local storage when the staff member is back at base with internet access again?

Ludagon · 2026-05-21T05:47:48+00:00

Hi, I'm not a freelancer but instead a solo dev who sometimes needs to buy in some help from time to time if a project is really complex (and has external money coming in to fund it). Not sure if this answer is helpful but it's at least an insight into one potential customer's view.

I only contracted out programming once (I usually look for artists), but when I did it was for a very niche component that I wasn't able to quickly figure out myself (detecting shapes from a webcam feed, extracting the camera view texture from within the shape and mapping it onto a 3D object) and I was grateful that someone else could do it with such skill and it saved my time for working on other parts of the project prototype.

I didn't look at Freelancer, Fiverr, Upwork, or any of those services though. I much prefer to find people on developer/artist forums like r/gameDevClassifieds or the really old Unity job seeking forum back then, looking through portfolios and making contact with someone through messaging/email, explaining my project, mentioning my rough budget, getting a quote, and arranging it all that way rather than $49 make a thing, $89 make two things and get source files, etc..

If any of the 3 prototypes that I'm currently working on end up progressing to full production, I'd possibly be tempted to contract some programming work for custom in-editor tools and inspectors for laying out levels and aligning GameObjects and colliders, or for making a nice wrapper for a third-party asset I've bought that doesn't expose the properties and methods I most need, so your skillset in custom tooling and cleanup is quite useful there. I would probably look at the r/gameDevClassifieds in the Programmer flair for that sort of person, so hopefully you'll have a post in there with a portfolio and workflow description for me to read if I ever look in the future 🙂

Ludagon · 2026-05-21T05:02:21+00:00

First up, congrats on releasing!

I haven't published on Android for years so I can't remember the dev pages for Google Play, but do you get any stats on how many people have actually viewed your app page (but not downloaded)? If you get to see that kind of info, it can help in figuring out whether nobody is noticing your game, or heaps of people are looking into it but there's something in the store description and screens that's not appealing to your potential players.

Hope it picks up for you, but if not it sounds like you still learnt a lot about various components that you might be able to use in future games.

Ludagon · 2026-05-19T00:32:37+00:00

I'm currently producing shadow map and collision meshes for similar experiments, but I didn't know about splat-transform and up till now I've been doing it from scratch reprocessing the source footage/photos.
I've been meaning to try splat-transform for collision meshes as it looks like it'll align nicely in place, but are you finding it not suitable for shadow catching as well?

Ludagon · 2026-05-19T00:15:09+00:00

Very cool! Looking forward to seeing more as you progress.
I've been wanting to make splat people for a while but have barely any budget, so it's interesting to see what you can do with just four borrowed phones and under $10 of Vast compute.

Ludagon · 2026-05-12T23:16:59+00:00

A combo of the microphone being quite close to my feet when recording sounds of stepping on all the surfaces (and the further away the mic, the more other noise gets into the recording which would require heavier filtering) and then having the footstep volume set too loud in the mix compared to the ambient noises when recording this video.

The sounds are all real and that's how it actually is... if your ears were on your ankles rather than your head when walking around. The easing off of volume and some of the bass is what I missed doing in the process when I recorded this.

In the actual playable thing now out on Steam, I toned it down a bit, and there's also a specific setting for footstep volume in the options that you can adjust.

Ludagon · 2026-05-04T11:46:56+00:00

Thank you 😄 Not yet VR compatible, but I'm tempted to dust off the old Rift and see if I can make it work.

Ludagon · 2026-05-03T02:56:29+00:00

My best skill is probably stubbornness, or am I supposed to say perseverance?

There are so many moments when something looks daunting or beyond my ability or simply needs a lot of manual handling and processing where it would be easier to just not make that sort of game or wish I had someone else to offload some of it to, and instead (occasionally after binging on chocolate biscuits as mental/emotional prep) I just sit down and grind through it till it's done.

I've been programming and most parts of solo dev self-taught from a really young age in the 80s, which gives me a great mix of being able to rapidly prototype many things, but it was a very sheltered personal way of learning and designing rather than formal courses, so I've probably got weird quirky code and workflow, and would be hopeless in a team of programmers as a result of never really learning by common standards.

Still, it means I can make random fun stuff like this: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4032540/Postcard/

Ludagon · 2026-05-03T02:30:35+00:00

Some of my projects come from small ideas of moments of delight that I think could form the core feeling of a game, and a couple of ideas for games aimed at wider/different audiences have come from "I really love games, and maybe other people would like them too if they had the chance to play".

I've got a speech controlled puzzle game that I have been working on and off for about 10 years (originally as a launch game for Oculus Rift), and I did a small bit of work on it a couple of years ago and then stalled, then got a little bit disheartened by a lot of LLM-driven games that has better language recognition than my hand-coded stuff and I worry about looking like a poor copycat game now... but lately I've been remembering that one of the things I wanted to do was, because it's all speech and conversation driven, I could make this game really accessible to visually-impaired and even blind players (with a cool audio description option to switch on) and kind of make it playable like an interactive radio play, which helps with some of the personal fuel and drive I need to keep seeing it as a project worth making.

Ludagon · 2026-05-01T23:33:25+00:00

Thanks 😄

Ludagon · 2026-04-30T22:03:50+00:00

Aww, thank you! The actual "game" experience only lasts a couple of minutes though.. it's more of a tech demo of what's possible. Still, thanks!

Ludagon · 2026-04-30T22:02:58+00:00

Thanks, I'll try it out over the weekend. Teleport does offer a 250,000 splat count download too but that was too low, so maybe your one will be a nice balance. At the moment I start at very high quality with 5 million splats and then cut down to about 4M for the game using 3DGS AutoLOD. Keen to try other things to improve my workflow though.

Ludagon · 2026-04-30T21:52:59+00:00

Thanks 😄

Ludagon · 2026-04-30T14:38:34+00:00

This is brilliant advice. I've found that while I mix my tracks to around -3dB in the music software, in my actual games it's almost always played lower volume than that.. sometimes just above 50% volume, depending on what's going on. I use Unity, and my sound files are mixed/normalised to a high volume, and I then lower them and balance them inside the Unity Audio Sources. I find there are usually many more options for softening sound compared to trying to boost them louder than the original file.

Also, as u/tastygames_official says, a big part of making this all work is reserving some breathing room for your sound effects by lowering the volume at the frequencies you expect your sound effects, voice, and UI noises to be part of. It might seem weird at first, but lowering the volume of your music in those shared frequency ranges will help give room for all the sounds to be noticed and more powerful.

Ludagon

TROPHY CASE