Ramblings

Summary

This is a long post where I describe the procedural generation algorithm we used for generating our city, then diagnose its performance problems and explain my shader-based rendering optimization.

Introduction

I have been working with a friend on a Unity game that takes place in a big procedurally generated city. This is what our city currently looks like:

In this post, I want to document some of the optimization work I've done on this project. Our city started off very small, but we ran into performance issues as we started to scale it up. I spent about 2 weeks working out the optimizations could do. It took a lot of fiddling to get there. In the end, the biggest changes I made involved adjusting the way we rendered buildings so that all of the distant buildings can be rendered mostly on the GPU. I would like to elaborate a bit more on this, but first, I need to explain how our city was generated.

Summary

I made a variant of a popular internet minigame. In this post, I describe the story and reasoning behind some of the design choices in my variation of the game.

What is an Anime Heardle??

Malheardle is a spinoff I made of Anime Heardle, which was a spinoff of Heardle, which was a spinoff of Wordle. You can play Malheardle here!

The main idea of Heardle is that the player has 6 tries to guess a mystery song. It starts by playing a 1 second clip of the song, but every time the player guesses wrong, they get to hear more of the song. Anime Heardle follows the same rules, but the songs are limited to anime opening and ending songs and the player must guess the anime.

I discovered Anime Heardle a while back, near the end of Covid, I found it a fun game to play with other people. Grabbing a few friends and trying to figure out the song/anime together, there are a lot of good experiences I've had with Anime Heardle:

• In general, I enjoyed the sensation of going down a detective rabbithole — identifying the artist/voice actor behind specific voices, tracing the music style back to specific bands, browsing through huge lists of shows to find the exact one that fits, and even tracking down specific memes we associated with the song we've heard. Doing all of this and eventually narrowing down the correct answer feels incredibly satisfying.
• There were also times where someone will take a random shot in the dark and actually hit, which is very exciting.
  • It is equally exciting when someones guessing something correctly off of a very, very tiny piece of information, like a single breathe at the start of the song.
• Often times people will get bent out of shape because they can recall hearing something, but not where it was from. Seeing this happen was fun because it raised the stakes of the game, making it more exciting if they end up getting it and funnier if they don't.
• Playing as a group, we've also discovered the social potential of the game. We would often react to unknown songs with sayings like "oh, I kinda like this", or "I hate it already", or, sometimes, "this show is definitely something X person would watch". Playing the game in a group transitioned very naturally into chatting about anime, about specific bands, artists, shows, or studios as relevant songs appeared in the game. These were chats that I enjoyed.

Summary

In this post, I recount the tools and resources I discovered and used when trying to make a mod in Elden Ring.

Context

At around 60 hours into my Elden Ring playthough, I took a slight detour from the game to investigate the modding scene of the game in search of nicer-looking armor. It seemed like some work has been done here, and there are some custom armor and character mods being shared on Nexus Mods, but none of them seemed very impressive. Most of these mods were minor cosmedic tweaks to existing armor pieces. However, this one did catch my eye. It was a mod that aims to replace the player character with Ayaka from Genshin Impact, a completely new character model from a game with a wildly different aesthetic. Skeptical that this could be any good, I downloaded the mod and tried it myself.

The mod had some problems, mainly, some of the proportions were off (like they were stretched to fit the Elden Ring player model), and the anime-styled face did not look good when rendered in the game. However, it did convinced me of its potential. I later dug around on the internet for more resources on Elden Ring modding and eventually decided that it was something worth trying out.

Goostory (Action Arcade Game)

I made this game in high school. It was a relatively big project, but I, like many other students, had plenty of free time in our final months of high school to do whatever. So I did this. I eventually got some friends to help with the art and finished it over the summer.

Since this was made so long ago, I don't remember much about how it was made or what interesting problems arose. But, the one thing I can say, playing through it now, is that I am quite impressed with the amount of content I had developed. Past me seems quite creative with the way he spun a few goose sprites into a variety of combat scenarios. I am also seeing how games like Touhou and Starcraft 2 influenced the design of this game. Those were games that I watched or played a lot back then.