Procedural creature progress 2021 - 2024

For my game The Big Forest I want to have creatures that are both procedurally generated and animated, which, as expected, is quite a research challenge. As mentioned in my 2024 retrospective, I spent the last six months of 2024 working on this — three months on procedural model generation and three months on procedural animation. My work on the creatures actually started earlier though. According...

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2024 retrospective

Another year went by as an indie game developer and what do I have to show for it? In last year's retrospective I wrote that apart from working on my game The Big Forest in general, I had four concrete goals for 2024: Present my Fractal Dithering technique Release my Layer-Based ProcGen for Infinite Worlds framework as open source Wrap up and release The Cluster as a free experimental game Make...

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Procedural game progression dependency graphs

In 2022 I came up with some new ideas for what kind of game The Big Forest (working title) could be. During the year, I developed a way to procedurally create dependency graphs and also procedurally create fully playable game levels based on the graphs. In the video below you can see the prototype I had near the end. A dependency graph is a concept in mathematics and computer science which...

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The Cluster is now released

The Cluster is finally released and available for free on Itch. It's a 2.5D exploration platformer set in an open world that's carefully procedurally planned and generated, and does a few interesting things I haven't yet seen in other games (check out the links for more info). Here's a trailer: My last blog post about The Cluster was in 2016 and titled "Development of The Cluster put on hold", and by that I meant put on hold indefinitely. At that time I had reached the conclusion that...

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2023 retrospective and goals for the new year

2023 was a pretty good year for me! I'll touch here briefly on my personal life, then go on to talk about the Quest 2 release and sales of Eye of the Temple, and finally talk about my new game project and goals for 2024. Personal life It's the first year since the pandemic that didn't feel affected by it. I moved from Denmark to Finland in 2020, just as the pandemic began, so on the social side...

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Charts to visualize how much you owe Unity for their per-install Runtime Fee

Unity Technologies has announced a new Unity Runtime Fee that charges developers a fee of up to $0.20 per installed game above certain thresholds. According to my calculations, it can be a bankruptcy death-trap, at least in certain cases. Shockingly, the owed percentage is unbounded to the point that the owed amount can exceed gross revenue, since it depends on installs, not sales. Update 1: Unity...

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Behind the design of Eye of the Temple, out on Quest 2

My VR adventure Eye of the Temple, that I've been working on since 2016, has landed on the Meta Quest 2! It was released last week on April 27th. Get Eye of the Temple for Quest 2 on the Oculus Store Originally released for SteamVR in October 2021, so many people have asked for it to be brought to the Quest 2 as a native app, so I'm happy it's finally a reality. The Quest 2 version was co-developed...

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