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Ray Marching
Cover image credit: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4slGD4 Ray marching is a method in which rays are started from camera into the game world. The ray keeps traveling forward in a loop, one step at a time, until it hits a surface. The surface here is not polygon, but a math function. This can work entirely in a fragment…
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Simulating Boids
Boids are used to simulate bird flocks, animal herds, and fish schools & is an example of swarm intelligence. Swarm intelligence refers to the collective behavior of individual agents who interact locally with one another and their environment to produce global patterns or behaviors. Individual members exhibit simple behaviors, but together they create complex movements…
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Simulating Ant Colony
This is an optimization algorithm and is used to find optimum solutions in a complex graph. Ants or other agents are left to explore and discover good solutions. For a game world, I think A-star algorithm is better for shortest path finding. Ant Colony Optimization The Algorithm 1. We start with a grid. Each cell…
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Procedural Generation Using L-Systems
Cover photo credits: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtyGzh Lindenmayer system (L-system) is a representation of how plants and some other biological structures grow. If we look at its text form, it is simply a sequence of simple characters called the initial state of the system. We also have a axiom (a rule) that defines what a particular character in…
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Dot Matrix Shader (LED Screen Effect)
It is a screen-space shader; we can replace the background black with some other color to simulate the tint & theme to make our scene more immersive. Shader breakdown: Godot Shader Code More Links
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Multiplayer & Networking in Games
Basic Networking Overview In multiplayer game, if we are sending data to another player, sending data to other player’s machine is not enough; we need to find which program/process must receive the data (out of many network-based programs running on destination machine). To achieve this, we have transport layer; which keeps track of destination process, we…
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Shaders & VFX in Games
Visual Effects (VFX) VFX is a category of effects that enhance the visual experience in games. VFX can include various elements like particle systems, dynamic lighting, explosions, fire, smoke, weather effects, and more. While shaders play a role in creating some visual effects, not all visual effects are achieved solely through shaders. Many effects involve…
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Physics & Collision Detection
Reading This article covers some techniques of physics used in games; however, collision detection, rigid-body dynamics, ragdoll physics, soft-body dynamics, etc are already well implemented by major game engines such as Godot, Unity, Unreal and so on. Collision Detection Overview This section provides basic bounding-volume based collision detection techniques that should be a good start.…
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Asset Creation & Game Art
What are Game Assets? Game assets consist of textures, 2D sprites (which are just images); or 3D models, sound/music files, animations and other elements used to synthesize game world & its sounds. Include game’s GUI menus as well. How do they look like? Some examples Getting Free Assets There are numerous websites online that have…