Colin Day

As a freelance rigger, I need to make sure my builds have a lot of flexibility. So I've recently reworked my lid modules to add variable joint counts. By utilizing a curve-based output I can changed the amount of joints used based on the needs of the project. Higher joint counts for fidelity and control, lower counts for simplicity and optimization. Or I can test and iterate to find a happy middle ground. So animators using my rigs on film or game projects can enjoy the same features, such as: - Automated lid follow with eye movement - Main controls to position the lids through translation and sculpt the curvature with rotation/scale  - Secondary controls for finer detail (If there are enough joints to support it) - Manual or automated blinking. Animate controls, or activate the automated meet point between your posed lids for a perfect seal I've been using iterations of this system over my last few projects, both commercials and games. The core elements of this system have been floating around in my head since 2018, so it's been great to finally put it to the test. 

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Puzzle Game Features Tier List Together with Playliner (by SensorTower), we made a list that answers one critical question: What actually works in puzzle games? 𝗦-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 = Features that boost retention and monetization  𝗔-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 = Strong value, but depends on execution  𝗙-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 = Players hate them, and they don’t pay off Here’s the full breakdown: 🔥 𝗦-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 (𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁) • Win Streak 🥇 • Tournaments 🏆 💚 𝗔-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 (𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗱𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁) • Season Pass 🎫 • Task-Based Rewards 🎁 • Mini-Games 🎮 • Co-Op Events 🤝 🟩 𝗕-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 (𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗱 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀) • Daily Tasks 📅 • Decoration Meta 🏡 • Daily Bonus ☀️ • PvP Events ⚔️ • Collections / Albums 📚 🟨 𝗖-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 (𝘄𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀) • Narrative Meta 📖 • Global Map 🌍 • Clans 👑 • Bonus Levels ✨ 🟫 𝗗-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 (𝗹𝗼𝘄-𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 / 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱) • Social Gifting 🎁 • Facebook Connect 🔗 • Rate Us 👍 🟥 𝗘-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 (𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀) • Gacha 🎰 • Lucky Wheel 🎡 • Chat 💬 • Profile Customization 🧑‍🎨 🚫 𝗙-𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿 (𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁... 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁) • Pay-to-Win Events 💸 • Overpriced Offers ⚠️ ---- More mobile game references at: https://playliner.com

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What is a Game Producer? It’s one of the most common questions I'm asked. Ask 10 studios what a producer does, and you’ll hear 10 different answers: program manager, scrum master, firefighter, team mom, cat wrangler. The truth is - a Game Producer is all of those things, and more! At its core, the producer role exists to bring clarity to a project. ➖ Clarity of plan - what are we building, when is it due, and why are we building it? ➖ Clarity of pipeline - is the work flowing, where are the bottlenecks and how do we fix them? ➖ Clarity of people - who owns what, who's doing what, and do they have the support they need? ➖ Clarity of proof - are we on track, what evidence do we have? That clarity helps to make better decisions, lets teams move faster and focus on what really matters: making great games. But clarity doesn’t come from templates or tools alone. It comes from trust and trust is earned. ✅ Trust across disciplines that you’ll listen, understand their needs and translate that to other disciplines. ✅ Trust from the team that you’ll shield them when needed, and push them when it matters. ✅ Trust from leadership that you can deliver what you’ve committed. Good producers work for their teams, they try to navigate around roadblocks and support both people and project. That balance is what separates a task-tracking coordinator, a paper pusher, from a true game production leader. I’ve seen producers rescue launches, re-align studios, and calm chaos in ways that made the difference between a failed project and a global hit! So - what is a Game Producer? A translator. A planner. A protector. A challenger. The person in the room who doesn’t make the game, but makes sure the game gets made. If you’re curious about how to step into that role, how to transition from outside the games industry, or how to sharpen the skills you already use, my Game Production course is built exactly for that. We dig into the frameworks, the signals, and the lived experience that help you grow from “smart teammate” to “trusted lead.” Next cohort starts Sept 30th. You can pick up the learnings here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/gec77gcq

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Tonight's the launch event for The Video Game Writer's Guide to Surviving an Industry that Hates You. I've gotten a lot of questions about the title, so let's put some answers out there and clear up some misconceptions in the process. One, I never said the industry hated only writers. I am sure members of many professional disciplines in gamedev can lay a reasonable claim to being hated by the institutional structures of our field. But, I'm not an expert in those, so I'm not going to write about them. I just know about the hate the industry has for writers, and so that's what my book is about. So I never said you weren't hated, my friends, just that I wasn't going to write about it. Two, I don't think that game developers by and large hate writers. I have worked with thousands of devs over the course of my career, and the overwhelming majority have been great folks, eager to collaborate and learn, excited for what narrative was doing and interested in finding ways we could work together to make the best games possible. What I do believe, however, is that the industry as configured is stacked against writers and writing in a way that makes for worse games, worse writing, a worse professional experience for writers, and just general misery in lots of different ways for folks who do the words thing. One of the core proposals of the book is to call out these ingrained bad practices, expose them for the problems they are, and offer ways to do better in the future. But for the moment, I've seen too many bad schedules, bad feedback processes, bad approval processes, and just plain bad approaches repeated to move from my original position. Now, if by some miracle this book takes off and everyone takes it to heart, I will be absolutely thrilled to write a sequel called The Video Game Writer's Guide to Working in an Industry That Loves You, but I'm going to wait and see how this one goes first. Three, this book is not a revenge tour and it never has been. I am not interested in making anyone look bad; that would distract from the actual point of the book. Every experience I relate is done in the interest of providing an approach to take forward or a technique a writer can use to produce a more positive result. If I mention things that were sub-optimal, it's in order to say "Let's stop doing this because here's what results from it, and let's maybe do something better". If all I wanted to do was a tell-all, I sure as hell wouldn't be writing it as a textbook. And four, the word's right there in the title. It's a guide. It's something intended to give direction, for game writers to pick up and read and hopefully find stuff in it that helps them in their day to day going forward. If there are places in the book that look back, it's only in the interest of avoiding those same pitfalls ahead. So I hope you pick it up, and if you do, I hope you find it enjoyable and amusing. And I hope you read it for what it is, and that's a good thing.

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Quick trick to cut the bandwidth usage of your online game by 87% when sending status effects ("Poisoned, stunned, etc.."): Store all status effects in a bitmask instead of using a boolean for each of them. "bool stunned", "bool slowed", "bool poisoned" -> take 1 byte each. "byte statusEffects" -> takes 1 byte in total [0000 0000], each bit represents a specific status effect (up to 8) If the value of the bit is "1", you are affected by that state. For example: "Poisoned" is the right-most bit -> its integer value is "1" "Slowed" is the bit before it-> its integer value is "2" You're Poisoned and Slowed? then your statusEffects' value is 3 => [0000 0011] in binary Want to know if you're Poisoned? Just use a bitwise AND with the value of the status: If (statusEffects & 1) == 1 --> you're slowed If (statusEffects & 2) == 1 --> you're poisoned If your game has up to 8 status effects, this trick will save you up to 7 bytes on each character/npc instance, which makes a lot of difference at scale (you pay 87% less for bandwidth, and encoding/decoding packages requires less CPU!) #JustDevIt  #gamedevelopment #multiplayer #netcode #optimization

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With the release of UE5.6, the Color Ramp node is now available. After reviewing the HLSL code, I noticed that the input values are not normalized — meaning values below 0 or above 1 can be passed through. For practical use, it’s safer to apply a Clamp before using it. The addition of the Convert node is also very convenient, making type conversions much more straightforward. On top of that, swizzling is now supported, which greatly improves flexibility when implementing shaders. #UE5 #UE5Study

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