unc0nnected

Hey guys, just thought that it would be a good idea to share some of the unity plugins or shaders that you couldn't imagine living without as there's so many gems in the asset store that some gems really get lost in the noise. When we were using Unity 4, Alloy and Amplify Color were two that we rarely made levels without although now in Unity 5 we find the native tools to be enough to replace amplify but we still stick with Alloy as our PBR shader just because of how much more control you get over the materials. uTomate was another one that I've had for a while but never had enough time to work it into our pipeline but remember getting super excited about. What about everyone else?

I can't believe I forgot about www.box.com We did a 6 month evaluation of all cloud storage solutions and at the end of it Box was ahead of the competition by such a huge margin it wasn't even funny. If you are collaborating with others this tool is invaluable and it forms the backbone of our entire company now both for content management and 90% of our communications. Couldn't live with it

www.jamendo.com - I think these are free for non-commercial use.. It's an absolutely gigantic repository of artists and music covered under the creative commons license

http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/ - relevant to the discussion about why some of what you described isn't really a bad thing, it's just the way the world works and improves upon itself

I've seen it but I'm a bit of chickenshit when it comes to anything node-based. It just always ends up turning into a giant spaghetti factory by the time I'm done. That's one of the reasons I've stayed away from Shaderforge. No doubt to my detriment as I know how awesome node-based stuff is but my heart trembles at the thought of it

That is incredible.. It's stuff like this that starts to really get me excited about VR. An entire VR tourism industry rising up

Howdy everyone, wanted to share something I was mulling over today. I run a small but growing dev house and as we've grown I've had to start thinking about filling a lot of positions that I never would have imagined myself hiring for, things 1 or 2 steps removed from actual creative or technical development. Creating and HR department for example and having someone dedicated to just HR. The department that we are also planning for is PR and hiring a Director of Communications to help shape our relationships with the public at large. As you can deduce from the title of this post I have a couple women in mind for a few positions in this department, both who have incredible track records in other industries. Both are enthusiastic gamers and are excited to work with us but neither are familiar with the games industry itself. The director of communications also happens to be my wife which, combined with the fact that she is unfamiliar with the the industry at large and things like Gamer Gate, has made me hesitant about having her in a public facing role. She is going to be incredible at directing our communications without a doubt but I realized today that the thought of her being our public face made me very nervous, again especially because this is a woman I love more than any other. If she was already in the industry and was willingly putting herself on the front lines then it would be a different story as she would know what she was signing up for but the idea of bringing on an outsider who really doesn't know about the nasty sexist side of the gamer community really made me reconsider what her responsibilities should be and that made me incredibly sad for our industry as a whole. To be clear I don't feel the need to 'shelter' my wife as she's the most independent lady I've met but I hate the fact that my first instinct in this situation is to infact shelter her from that shitstorm of insanity that woman have to deal with in this indsutry. Anyways, my next step is to have a lot of long talks with her about the state of the industry and what might be in store before making any decisions but I was curious if any other studio heads have faced a similar dilema or if there are any women here who are in public positions and what advice you might have or women just entering the industry from the outside. PS - Been listening to the show since episode one when I was doing a podcast of my own and 7 years later or so I've decided to get a bit more involved in this great community. Thanks for all the pods you guys have cast on our faces over the years

Thanks for answering the question thumbs, pretty much what I had in mind but a good point about getting worked up to limit myself to the only possible outcome of this being her having a horrible experience. Although the fact that she can't even walk to her work now without getting harassed leaves me jaded some days It is a tremendous gift that I can now play the end of this episode after I've chatted more about this with her(if she doesn't here it first listening to you guys on her way to work) and we can bring you all in on the conversation. Big ups!

Bah, shows how much I pay attention. Missed this thread before I started posting but I'm here now to say hai!

Not terribly excited for the game itself as I think my tastes have moved away from this kind of game, but I'm super excited that the guys who brought us a lot of the Gold box games are kickstarting their next game: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/537511454/seven-dragon-saga-by-tactical-simulations-interact

Hell if you're asking us to flog our services then I wont' turn that down. I, as well as some other fine folks, represent Ironbelly Studios - www.ironbellystudios.com We're a tight knit collective of awesome who have been providing 2D, 3D, Animation, Programming, VFX, Level design and every other service under the sun. I won't bloat the thread with images or vids but feel free to head over to the site to check out our work

As I mentioned in that article, espresso and changing my environment was also a big help. Getting out of the house, working in a cafe on the laptop meant that I couldnt' go to youtube or anywhere else out of respect for the limited bandwidth of the cafe and because I don't like people watching me surf facebook/youtube over my shoulder. I use scrumboards to organize just about everything else in life including projects which is a huge help

totes mcgroates voted, lucky #50!

I'll admit that blueprints are a leaner and better system for heavier usage for sure, but out on the projects we've worked on that were of any weight the developers all came to the same solution and that's that a large complex project composed entirely of blueprints will eventually get crushed under their cumulative weight. Little systems here and there aren't going to make a difference on their own but when we get into 100's of blueprinted systems or 1000's they all add up to a noticeable hit on performance and stability. Simple projects or proof of concept demos I would encourage people to use them whole heartedly but if you are making something complex like a full fledged FPS or particularly an RPG then I would steer people away from it. I imagine it's something that epic is working hard to improve and may have already gotten them up to the point but I remember one of our clients getting about 9 months in of heavy development just to realize they would have to go back and rip out all of the major blueprinted systems and redo them with C++ as the project reached a certain size, the only thing would want to say here would be to mitigate that risk and be selective on what you blueprint and what you do in C++

Sorry if this has been asked before but I couldn't find it in my searches.. Is there a way to pull up the RSS for specific forums, the 38-game-development forum in specific? I like to setup feeds in my netvibes reader that are forum specific to do a bit of filtering. Thanks!

I'm excited as hell at VR from a personal level but I have no excited from a game dev perspective for the immediate future as the hardware requirements to get a solid 75FPS at the graphic quality that gamers expect these days is still 2-3 years away from being mainstream which means we're really 2-3 years out from even knowing if VR is going to even be adopted by the mainstream. Does anyone have any info on when the Vive Dev kit will be available?

We use box.com for all of our content management and couldn't recommend it enough for collaborating. Mindomo is a great tool for mindmaps that allows for multi-user real time collaboration Rescuetime probably changed my life more than most other (http://ryanwiancko.com/2013/03/24/rescuetime-a-graphical-representation-of-how-this-one-app-has-dramatically-changed-my-life/) Evernote is another fantastic tool for jotting down your thoughts on a moments notice, and has some collaborative functionality.

Thanks for the video link, didn't know they even had this show. Crayon Physics, Quantum Conundrum, The Stanley Parable or the Vanishing of Ethan Carter are the 4 in my steam list that I've never had to do anything violent in, although I haven't made it all the way through the last one so who knows what's in store for me?

We've been working with UE4 for 2 years or so and I have to say that in the past 4 months we've seen some incredible direction with how they are letting the community shape the engine through bug fix submissions and involvement. One of the things I would caution anyone about though is buying too much into the idea that blueprints are the way forward to make your game. Epic has this way of creating these amazing user friendly tools like kismet or blueprints and then overselling just how much they can/should be used for the development of a product. They are fantastic prototyping tools, no doubt, but if any of you are getting into the engine watch out for games getting crushed under the weight of relying too heavily on blueprints. C++ is still the best way to go for creating and implementing complex system so be wary of becoming too dependent on blueprints because they offer the path of least resistance in terms of an entry barrier. Anyways, here's a little something we cooked up for the Identity project that just got kickstarted:

Long time listerner, first time poster, just though I'd chime in with the other folks to send in high praise to Cara as a guest. I'd love her to be a regular guest or hell have her own show.