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Reposted by Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥

The Daily Grind Rail @thedailygrindrail.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Game: Devil's Derby Release: 4/2/2025 Developer: @elliottayling.co.uk Rail Location: ???

Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 03/01/2026

Playing around with #Unity new graph toolkit stuff to build out a tool for defining my 'expeditions' (choose your own adventure type system). Seems pretty good, but missing a fair bit at the moment. Hopefully 6.4 sorts a lot of it out.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 03/12/2025

Happy to say that The Fire Must Grow🔥 is taking place in the #MidwinterSpirits steam event! ❄️ A great celebration of current and upcoming games that celebrate the cosy start of winter! Check out the sale page! store.steampowered.com/curator/4412... Thanks @IvyJuiceGames

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 15/11/2025

Keep your villagers safe from the terrors that lie beyond the light. #screenshotsaturday

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 11/11/2025

New game! The Fire Must Grow. A hex-based horror city builder. 🏘️Grow your village. 🔥Tend the flame. 💀Sacrifice your villagers. 👹Meet strange people and creatures. Coming soon! Wishlist on #Steam ! #gaming #horrorgame #indiegame

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 04/09/2025

Damn, everybody trying to buy Devil's Derby today have crashed Steam. Crazy stuff. Guess I'll play #Silksong instead.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 23/08/2025

This game is over 10 years old. Still looks amazing. Arkham Knight.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 16/08/2025

Added a table UI class. Supports dynamic column/row changes and sorting. Editor and runtime support. Here it is tracking total existing resources. Will help me add various stats windows. Quite neat. #gamedev #madeinunity

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 11/08/2025

Basic farming system done (sped up). Villager plants/maintains/harvests crops. Crop can fail, be affected by weather, temperature etc, which can effect final yield. Needs some UI, but quite happy at the moment #gamedev #madewithunity

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 24/07/2025

Just updated this and my resource system to use "IResourceAttribute". Effectively means I now raise request for any attributes (IsEdible, IsBurnable etc) rather than specific resources. Resource itself is a IResourceAttribute though, so you can still do that. Much more flexible. #gamedev

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 21/07/2025

I wrote up how I designed my logistics system in my next game. It's not a complete in depth post, but just a general overview of how it works at the moment, and the classes/objects that it uses. Hope it is helpful to some people. #gamedev #madeinunity

medium.com

Unity C# Logistics System

Hello. I’m Elliott. I’m a software engineer, but I also made the arena FPS Devil’s Derby on Steam. You can find me on Twitter and Bluesky…

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 02/07/2025

Reworking my logistical system right now- easily the most complex part of the code so far. It gets complicated fast. Have to be strict with your abstractions, and don't design yourself in a corner with no room to expand. Lots of edge cases! Might do a little write up when I'm happy with it #gamedev

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 27/06/2025

Devil's Derby is 20% off in the Steam Summer Sale! Give it a go if you like fast paced shooters. #indiegames #steam #fpsgames

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 18/06/2025

Swear 50% of #gamedev time is just save/load edge case bugs and UI fiddling. Losing my mind.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

Happy with this at the moment, some optimisations to do still. Hope to share more about the game when I can! Thanks for reading!

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

This gives us the lightmap value! If this is above 0 we just use that, if not we fallback to the regular lighting value. This gives nice separation of areas, a nice falloff into darkness, and also allows partial lit areas to create fully lit areas. Very good.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

Shaders to the rescue though! I create a 1D texture of the lightmap values. I already have a way to give each hex a unique ID in range 0-numberOfHexes so mapping each hexes lightmap value to a texture was simple. Then in shader, we calculate the fragments hex, and ID, then map to UV.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

But the main con for this actually is I want partially lit areas to be able to merge into a fully lit hex, if their lightmap value reaches a certain threshold, and this can't do that easily. In fact it doesn't read the lightmap value at all- just mimics the area of it. So not the solution.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

Pros: Clear separation of lit area. Nice falloff. Cons: Hard to tell what is partial lit, and the start of the darkness fallout area.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

Next thing was to use the freeform lighting shapes. Calculate the edges of the lit region and set that as the freeform light shape. Then added another freeform light to add the falloff around it. A range of pointy top hexes makes a more or less flat top hex, so mostly easy.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

Could potentially solve this with some stencilling, but sounded like a PITA.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

First thing I tried was ignoring lighting system and toggling tiles on/off dependant on hex lightmap value- where partial lit just overlays a semi transparent black tile. Pros: Easy. Cons: Objects "clip" at the edges where object is technically on hex, but pixels fall outside of it. No falloff.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

I have a "lightmap" where any game light source can contribute a lighting value within a fully lit range of hexes, and then a partial lit range beyond that. Here it is 6 and 1. This is independent of Unity's lighting system, just data. If a value is above a certain threshold, it becomes fully lit.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 31/05/2025

Working on "the next thing" which is all hex based with a lighting mechanic. I wanted clearly defined hexes of fully lit (where player can build), partial lit (risky to build here), and darkness (big no no), with a nice fall off at the edges. But how did I do this in Unity? #gamedev #madeinunity

A screenshot of a hex based game, in the centre a fire, with a building to the right, and people around the fire. The fire is illuminating the surrounding hexes, showing the forest.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 13/05/2025

Devil's Derby is Steam Deck Verified! And it's also 15% off for the week! Go try it out! #indiegame #madewithunity #gaming #indiedev #steamdeck

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 08/05/2025

Moved back to Unity for this project. Not because I didn't like #godot, but, as this was a Unity port, realised I spending too much time rewriting core systems instead of finishing the game. Also having to implement systems I use asset store assets for. Already missing certain parts of Godot though!

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 07/05/2025

Anybody got any experience with hex grids in #pixelart? I've settled on a size of 18x20 pointy top hexes, so that a 16x16 sprite can sit on it comfortably. Any considerations I need to take into account?

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 27/04/2025

Making pixel animations is hard. Never done it before. This is my first walking animation. It's not so bad. #pixelart #gamedev

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 20/04/2025

Wrote some stuff to simplify serializing custom structs and classes to #godot editor to make for easier debug. Read only at the moment, but works on C# collections too (even collections of custom objects). Might clean it up and put it on github- could be useful.

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 18/04/2025

Godot is really fantastic. Having a great time using it. Very fast and iterative. Have a few nitpicks, but considering it's completely free and open source who cares really. Amazing bit of software. #gamedev #godot

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 17/04/2025

Decided to just use #godot as a kind of frontend/renderer for this project as it's fairly simulation heavy. Considering it's just me, I don't need to be super designer aware. Have written ~7k lines of code before I've even put a graphic on screen so far 😅

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 16/04/2025

Actually quite a lot of good stuff in this old project. But really wish I had documented it, even a little 😭

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Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥 @elliottayling.co.uk · 16/04/2025

Think that's partly what I've settled on. Just copying struct to a resource for purposes of debugging in editor only.

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