iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/09/2026

Interesting... Unity is removing Intel MacOS editor from 6.7 and built-in renderer is deprecated in 6.5. Big things happening on the Unity side. #gamedev

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 29/08/2026

Solved the DLSS issue plaguing my Unity project for the last few years… now, I’m getting > 60fps in 4K 🎮🛠️

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 20/08/2026

That sounds about right. The longer an engine tries to address gaps for its gamedev audience & make techniques more turn-key, the more complexity it picks up... especially with systems like motion matching, terrain and biome generation, mocap, realistic skin/eye/hair rendering, and similar features.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 20/08/2026

People tend to romanticize old video games quite heavily, but actually playing them was quite difficult and frustrating. You could easily play a few hours, gaining levels, without a save system, putting a game on "pause" for half a day, only to have someone in the house turn it off while you're away

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 17/08/2026

Yeah, I think it’s clear the player community has rejected AI & most devs are actively avoiding generative AI & vibe coding. Yet, over the past year, nearly all the game dev industry tools have added or will add AI features to augment non-creative workflow like reducing repetitive tasks.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 17/08/2026

As far as I can tell, whenever AI is talked about w/ respect to game dev & coding, it’s under the context that it’s “vibe coded” versus predictive auto-complete, etc. We haven’t seen much discourse w/ ai assists like MCP/Mocap/perf analysis/pathfinding/etc..

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 16/08/2026

Nice.... Inspiration from Frazetta?

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 16/08/2026

Nice work! Keep going 🛠️🎮

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 16/08/2026

Few now know what it was like in the beginning... Having to use a customized & undocumented 3GL which would compile into a proprietary binary, and then a second compile to (hopefully) make an executable every time you needed to run any kind of iterative test case.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 14/08/2026

Passes: Game Changer [$1,149], Festival [$499], Indie [$299], Festival Hall Only [$149], Business Hall Only [$99], 1-Day Career [$99], GDC Vault Subscription [$649] Then add $5k for hotel & airfare. They really need to stop hosting this in SF.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 14/08/2026

Had a chance to chit chat w/ R.G. about 10 yrs ago, great guy and funny. Glad he found funding for his next adventure game (although probably fraught with peril).

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 11/08/2026

At the start of the pipeline, it's rough carpentry shading wise. The key is to stay on a PBR rail through all the work, finalize any non-mesh work before hitting Unity, then it's all about lighting, lighting, lighting 😅

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 11/08/2026

It's quite the mix: Zbrush, CC4, iClone, Blender, motion live, and custom shaders for skin, eyes, hair, skin textures from Texturing XYZ, and I use the HDRP pipeline in Unity.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 10/08/2026

No doubt, Metahumans would have made things a lot easier on my workflow, such as it is, I was able to get some decent looking animatable characters into Unity, complete with blendshapes for facial mocap, but it did take years to work out the shaders and workflow.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 10/08/2026

Props to you for forging ahead in UE! Looking forward to seeing more of your project.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 10/08/2026

Best method I found was to use FinalIK & subscribe a method to ik.solver.OnPreUpdate to grab positions of any bone transforms, then process any additional tweaks in LateUpdate. Why did they have a quick mask for hands but not feet?!?! Ahhhh Unity... 😆

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 10/08/2026

Thanks, yeah... Unity doesn't do devs any favors w/ humanoids. They did eventually add a rigging & IK pkg, but like everything Unity it's bare min. Then on top of that, trying to get a AAA-style character (skin, hair, eyes) look for cutscene cinematics took me 3 yrs to get the workflow down. 😅

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 10/08/2026

Thanks! Yeah I used pre-made mocap animations for different halves of the armature. In Unity, I'm blending layers w/ masks then using IK. Hahaha didn't notice until you mentioned it 👍

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 10/08/2026

Yup... I had some cover mechanics I had coded in, but had to temporarily remove it because my architecture for handing weapons/aiming had to change. I need to get back to it at some point but because of the difficulty, not looking forward to it 😅

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 10/08/2026

Shooting from cover is deceptively more difficult to code than it looks. Nice job! 👍

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 10/08/2026

That’s some pricey gamer merch. I kind of assumed that gamers aren’t buying this kind of stuff anymore but maybe I’m wrong 🤷‍♂️

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 08/08/2026

Thanks, yeah, started watching it... usually have things like this going on in the background as I gamedev 👍 🛠️🎮

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 08/08/2026

Could be a Journey or Boston album cover too 🚀

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 08/08/2026

One of the things I really liked about BG:DA was it's pacing and not getting lost in the weeds of side missions, plus co couch co-op really elevated the gameplay. Would be interesting to look it again, 25 years later... 🎮

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 08/08/2026

As soon as AI figures out how to be the snarky non-answer-providing 'expert' in Unity Forums, we're all cooked.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 08/08/2026

Yup... I get why some people are frustrated with non-lowpoly games if they haven't upgraded in 6-8 yrs. Looking at the metrics, >70% of Steam players have the hardware to run most modern-GPU games w/ >16GB RAM & a fast multi-core CPU. store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

store.steampowered.com

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 08/08/2026

Working on code today, but here’s something from earlier... Some of the stealth gameplay of walking a hostage around to ideally, perhaps a dark corner for interrogation... 🛠️🎮 #screenshotsaturday #indiegames #gamedev

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 07/08/2026

Most indie gamdevs (including myself) have a vision for what we're looking to build, stylization & genre choices then determine the platform requirements. Think of it this way, if you're an artist, you don't pick out the wall frame before you pick up the paint brush.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 07/08/2026

That is weird... glad it got fixed. Unity has always had a strange shader to render pipeline relationship, it was really bad 2019-ish, every small update required entirely new shaders, no forward compatibility at all. Supposedly v7 is going to have a new shader abstraction layer.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 07/08/2026

Probably a missing diffusion profile for the leaves shader or in the render profile. Other than that, you could try editing the shader and then re-saving it so it updates for new version of the render pipeline.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 07/08/2026

Yup, you’re probably going to have to write a function that acts as a “pause game” type of functionality that toggles on/off on your interact function. Lord knows what that is in godot 🤔

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 07/08/2026

Yeah I’ve run into a few of those myself! 😅

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 07/08/2026

It’s understated how complicated and detailed gamedev actually is. You get there though after a lot of tutorials, experiments, lectures. The key is perseverance and not getting discouraged when something doesn’t work out the way you envisioned, but just keep showing up and putting in the work. 🛠️🎮

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Dying over here on the name of the game lol 😂✌️

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Was just about to offer a spare GPU I had to another game developer, since they may have needed some extra hardware help and they... blocked me 🤷‍♂️🛠️ Ahhhh bluesky... 😅 #indiegame #gamedev

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Ahh figured, solid work, keep going! 🛠️🎮

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Sure, I get that. Not sure how it works in godot, but in unity you get a mask to filter colliders you don't want returned in your cast. Godot likely has it too. So you can attribute things you do/don't want to climb on, etc. I had a lot of triggers in early games, they're more problematic in Unity.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Sure, makes sense. A lot of times, I use a separate project to build test rigs and experiment with to see what works best. I wouldn't stray from your state machine flow.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Nice work on the highlighting & subtitles. (It looks like metahumans faces look slightly washed out, maybe it's just the lighting in your test level?)

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Seen worse, but yeah... if you're sticking to the BRP/URP and 2D/lowpoly stylized games, it's not too terrible. Trying to tackle mid poly w/ HDRP & off loading CPU to GPU bound processes, that would be... noticeable on your rig.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

2/2 Start simple: blend climb/jump animations w/ rotation & position changes. I did something similar in Unity using MM, PA, a state machine, raycasts & IK, mainly because I expanded hopping over/on obstacles into ledge climbing, ladders, pipe crawling, etc.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

1/2 Well, in that RE4 clip, they're using motion matching and a bit of procedural animation. It's a good idea to use a state machine for climbing, especially to hand edge cases in your logic. Do use raycasting, skipping it is probably asking for a world of lvl design hurt w/ trigger boxes.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

One of the few realizing where it's going. A lot of people are still struggling w/ that very idea because they may not have the most up to date AI literacy, dismissing some threats because they find them too implausible. I have no doubt in < 5 years, AI will make a feature complete AAA style game 😬

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

A good start on worldbuilding for sure... I started with sheets as well, so I know what you mean. If you got a bit of artistry in your back pocket, consider some concept art to build out a board or deck you can share.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Yeah, I'm sure the campaign is likely multifaceted. Some early D&D campaigns were structured like that, an "all summer long" game that if a player dies, it's still a longplay for all involved. AD&D 2E: Night Below is a good example, it's (3) 60+page books... so it's not a weekend kind of thing.

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

The wolves look great, nice work! (No idea if you're in Unity and using Cinemachine, if so, the shimmy stutter might be caused by the camera being mounted on the player armature)

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

One would hope there's no soft lock in it 😬 As for player deaths as a gamedev, I like the slightly adjusted Gary Gygax method.. "The worthy [dev] never purposely kills [players], [just] present opportunities for the rash and unthinking players to do that all on their own."

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

Rare opportunity for an easter egg to increase your gank level… 🎮

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Outer Reach GameDev @playouterreach.com · 06/08/2026

That’s awful… crazy how some people think that’s okay to take advantage of others that way.

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