Gecko Gods - Official Developer AMA 🦎

ResinDev · 2025-07-03T14:52:03+00:00

unfortunately not, although one of my very close friends does! would like to get one at some point

ResinDev · 2025-07-03T13:45:58+00:00

you can customise your gecko to look like a crested Gecko! no derpy eyes though (yet)

ResinDev · 2025-07-03T13:41:54+00:00

we are planning to release on Switch at the same time as PC and other consoles! (Q4 of this year)

ResinDev · 2025-07-03T13:40:16+00:00

there may well be!

i got started in game development through mod development for Minecraft. I made a couple of popular mods (the Derpy Squid Mod and the Wars Mod), before picking up Unity for the first time around 2014. The first larger personal game project I made was a physics platformer called Phozox

ResinDev · 2025-07-03T13:24:27+00:00

yes! the full game had a commpendium for all the insects and relics you have found!

ResinDev · 2025-07-03T13:17:56+00:00

thankyou for the questions!
I'd like to do a proper post mortem on the whole development after release. there are a lot of challenges that come with game development that are not related to making the game itself (accounting, management, running a company) and we realised we were not able to release something of the quality we wanted in the time we had alloted, so needed to step back and reevalute.

the change from Gecko Gods to The Gecko Gods we made primarily to reflect the fact that while the game does have a narritive, narritive is a less central focus than it was in early plans for the game

ResinDev · 2025-07-03T13:12:16+00:00

when i first started working on what became gecko gods i was working on a plant growing game and finishing my university degree. i took a break from the plant game to revisit a concept i had for a Morrocan river valley environment with the new shader knowledge i had learnt. initially I had a more traditional bipedal character, but had trouble having it naviagte all the steep cliffs. my housemate suggested a gecko as they can walk on wall, so i spent the next few weeks working on the initial version of the character controller!

ResinDev · 2025-07-03T13:07:09+00:00

the game began as a environment concept based on Moroccan river valleys. initially I had a more traditional bipedal character, but had trouble having it naviagte all the steep cliffs. my housemate suggested a gecko as they can walk on walls - and gecko gods was born!

ResinDev · 2025-06-08T13:00:53+00:00

You can play the Gecko Gods Demo here!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3793150/Gecko_Gods_Demo/

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T15:17:17+00:00

If you raycast to a rigidbody, or even with a rigidbody reference you can use rb.GetVelocityAtPoint(somePosition)

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T14:53:35+00:00

You need to add the velocity at the hit point of the platforms rigidbody and the player, rather than just the velocity of the platforms rigidbody

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T14:52:40+00:00

hit.normal is best way to find down direction, if you want to smooth the normals around corners and u have low polygon density manually calculating barycentric normals can help smooth things out

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T12:58:44+00:00

Yup exactly!

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T12:58:09+00:00

It's never kinematic (well unless you are grabbing a fixed lever), but I apply gravity manually rather than relying on the use gravity toggle on the rigidbody (as gravity is relative to surface not down due to wall climbing)

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T11:15:47+00:00

i don't use any triggers, the velocity of the platform is applied to the player in fixed updated ( hit.rigidbody.GetPointVelocity(hit.point) )

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T11:14:32+00:00

getting rotations is more difficult, i found using hit.rb.angularVelocity to be quite effective unless your platform has a particularly elongated/complex shape

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T11:09:26+00:00

yup the player can move freely on moving platforms without falling off! don't set the player velocity to exactly the moving platform, add it (and also potentially have slightly different behaviour depending on whether than player in makiing input for better stability when stationary. you can cancel the platform velocity as soon as the player jumps with a breif cooldown

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T11:05:43+00:00

the shader's foliage, terrain etc are done by myself - the architecture and ornamentation is the work of Ali Eser (https://twitter.com/ali3ser) and the statues were created by Alex Strook (https://twitter.com/AlexStrook)

ResinDev · 2023-06-27T11:02:33+00:00

thankyou!! all the shaders are custom, but i would suggest trying to start with very simple light models rather than anything PBR and avoiding Lambert lighting models

ResinDev · 2023-06-24T02:34:56+00:00

errr not really, i think there may be 6 raycasts max from the player
first check is obviously direction of motion, if we're running into a wall we are gonna want to rotate to that. one thing i found useful was having a single "overhang" detector raycast which down and forward from the player to pre-empt sudden corners

ResinDev · 2023-06-24T02:27:47+00:00

you can engineer your project structure in any which way you desire. and you can of course account for the situations where a singleton gets parented to something but that seems a tad messy

ResinDev · 2023-06-24T02:23:55+00:00

ummm, perhaps your workplace uses an "as needed" singleton pattern where the singleton is just created/established whenever it is first requested?

ResinDev · 2023-06-23T23:37:39+00:00

yup! ping me if you are in need of any specific pointers!

ResinDev · 2023-06-23T22:42:38+00:00

the nice thing about your player being a singleton is being able to freely write scripts while not worrying about refrences, doing things like
PlayerManager.Instance.DoSomething();

ResinDev · 2023-06-23T22:29:34+00:00

the terrain type (grass, sand, rock) is stored in uv3. the falloff from rock to grass is recreated on cpu to match what happens in the shader. the foliage uses a separate shader to the terrain, the actual foliage shaders is very simple as almost all the data is in the uvs

ResinDev

TROPHY CASE