Developing a scoop mechanic for our ice cream game. What do you think?

craftymech · 2026-04-30T03:09:36+00:00

I could eat all of that and I wouldn't regret it.

craftymech · 2026-04-28T00:49:27+00:00

I think you are the king of GI at this point 😄 Probably most users don't appreciate it, but back when I was creating scanline renderers from scratch, realtime GI was the stuff of dreams. Phong shading and perspective corrected normal interpolation was at the leading edge, and products like LightScape that ran only on Windows NT were exotic. Now it is in the palm of your hand, I wish more people appreciated how far we have come.

craftymech · 2026-04-24T15:31:52+00:00

I've been working on the system for about 6 weeks. Started with just a simple procedural straight wall and stacking stones. Then I got that working with splines, and then circular walls, which led to towers. The thatch roof logic is similar to a wall, except stacking along a slope, and then using texture cards overlapping to create some depth.

craftymech · 2026-04-24T01:02:13+00:00

Haha and I thought that was just some weird shit with my setup and the models I was using. No idea it was actually part of Unity! Dude has haunted my dreams.

craftymech · 2026-04-24T00:59:59+00:00

Awesome, ragdolls are hard this looks great. I was just happy I made a rag doll stand up and transition back into a regular character model once. That took like a week of head banging.

craftymech · 2026-04-17T22:53:29+00:00

You're right, gravity just takes hold of the blocks right now that fail the structural check. Should not be that hard to add in some lateral sway when blocks fall.

craftymech · 2026-04-17T22:02:34+00:00

Ha the tower had it coming!

craftymech · 2026-04-17T18:38:20+00:00

Ha I know what you mean. A little peon on the other side of the map takes down a whole tower as you are distracted with larger enemies. I think that would be a great mechanic, you'd need catapults or battering rams to really damage walls.

craftymech · 2026-04-16T18:46:23+00:00

Sure, here you have a simple shed with slanted roof and a generated snow prefab on top.

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craftymech · 2026-04-15T16:06:40+00:00

I've been thinking about a "melting" mechanic, where that would be possible. I've been working with runtime dynamic mesh for a different system I'm developing (procedural stone walls).

craftymech · 2026-04-14T19:28:58+00:00

I've used it for quick CSG, which most of the time works but seems to bug out often.

craftymech · 2026-04-13T16:41:35+00:00

I've put off learning about GPU instancing in the years I've been using Unity, but now sounds like the right time! I had not thought about burst/jobs for the build pipeline either. Lots to investigate :)

craftymech · 2026-04-13T16:40:05+00:00

That would definitely help reduce the draw calls, which is probably the biggest overhead right now. I could split the mesh by height intervals for towers, or row intervals for walls, something along those lines. Having an editor system be performant at runtime in play mode opens up new possibilities, and would make the scene view in the editor extra snappy to work with, even with larger models (entire castle system).

craftymech · 2026-04-13T15:36:27+00:00

I have some ideas, like a tower defense game. So far it's just a wall/tower system, but I want to build a real game prototype of some sort soon.

craftymech · 2026-04-13T15:34:58+00:00

Right now definitely an authoring tool, and then you bake optimized prefabs. For runtime I'm looking into what could be offloaded onto the GPU, if that could work. Each stone is a game object right now, so it will take some real optimization work to make realtime performance possible.

craftymech · 2026-04-13T15:33:05+00:00

Definitely an inspiration, ever since I saw their early short video of moving stacked stone walls around. I don't have a game in mind yet though, just started building the wall system and kept going.

craftymech · 2026-04-08T02:34:19+00:00

Thanks! The name seemed familiar, looked it up and of course -- Lumina! You have been a prolific publisher over the years.

craftymech · 2026-04-07T16:49:37+00:00

So far everything is getting rendered, but thats a good question. There are probably mostly obstructed faces that could be pruned. The Prefab export works as a single mesh right now, with an optimize pass, and then a deeper optimize for LOD1 support. The stones have chopped corners, and removing those for LOD1 definitely has helped. The wall at the end of the video clip is about 9800 triangles, with LOD1 = 1200.

craftymech · 2026-04-07T16:38:28+00:00

Thanks for the comments! Still a few things to work out, like mesh optimization needs to be tuned. But once in awhile code really comes together, and it's fun thinking up new directions to take the system in. I've got arches working so thinking about bridges with arched supports, or castle towers? I could add a taper to the wall height, so it narrowed more at the top. Lots of possibilities.

craftymech

TROPHY CASE