Dario Ahdoot

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. 

1,528

27 Comments

🎛 Tactile is Out! 🚀 The idea is simple: create lush and evolving ambiences from audio files that respond to real-time movement. Scaper users will find this plugin familiar (because it is!), but with a different twist... this time, sound will dynamically shift based on the user's input 💯👌🏽 At its core, Tactile blends a custom spectral freezing engine with layered granular synths: • The spectral freezer isolates a time slice of the sound, holding it in place for deep exploration of its frequency content. • On top of this frozen layer, dual granular processors continuously resample audio sources (mapped to the X and Y axes) Sounding interesting? Check Tactile here: https://lnkd.in/dbkdAvsW I had the pleasure of assisting and consulting the team during the creation of this plugin. Hope you like it as much as we do! ✨ Have you tried Tactile yet? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! #Dsp #AudioProgramming #Music #SoundDesign #Vst #Production #Plugin #Cpp #Interactive

326

38 Comments

Can you built a Unity game WITHOUT opening the Unity Editor? Yes, it’s possible. In my latest experiment, I used Cursor AI + GitHub to build a full-fledged Tic-Tac-Toe game — and the best part? I didn’t even open the Unity game engine until the final stage! Here’s what I did: ✅ Created a GitHub repo ✅ Connected it with Cursor AI ✅ Gave a few well-crafted prompts ✅ Watched as the AI handled scripting, scene setup, and logic — all from VS Code 🎮 From generating HTML versions to refining a Unity-native build, this process was a mix of automation, iteration, and a little manual intervention. But it proved one thing loud and clear: AI is not just assisting, it’s evolving the way we build games. ✨ I also created additional public repos including: An Object Pooling system A Procedural Story Generator 👨‍💻 Check out the full breakdown and live demo in my new video: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dHvkBv-h If you're a Unity developer (or even just curious), this is a must-watch. #GameDevelopment #Unity3D #CursorAI #AItools #GitHub #CodingWithAI #IndieDev #GameDevTools #LinkedInGaming #NikhilMalankar

75

6 Comments

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.

156

35 Comments

Why Video Game Graphics Seem Like They Stopped Improving Ten years ago, The Witcher 3, Arkham Knight, and Metal Gear Solid V set a new bar for visual fidelity. Fast forward to today, and while games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Horizon Forbidden West are undeniably more detailed, the leap doesn’t feel as monumental as, say, PS2 to PS3. So why does it seem like graphics have stalled? 1. Diminishing Returns The biggest factor is simple: we hit a wall. Early 3D games improved drastically year after year because low-poly models and flat textures left so much room to grow. But once characters stopped looking like blocky mannequins, further refinements such as higher-res textures, slightly smoother animations became subtler. A 50,000-polygon model doesn’t look twice as good as a 25,000-polygon one. At some point, the human eye just stops noticing. 2. The Cost of Realism Modern AAA games chase photorealism, but that’s an exponentially harder target. - Realistic skin requires subsurface scattering. - Believable lighting demands ray tracing. - Dynamic foliage needs physics simulations. Each step forward demands far more processing power for smaller visible gains. Red Dead Redemption 2 still looks incredible, but it took eight years and a half-billion dollars. 3. Art Direction vs. Raw Power Some of the best-looking games today such as Elden Ring and Hades aren’t pushing technical boundaries. They succeed through strong art direction, proving that style ages better than raw fidelity. Meanwhile, many "realistic" games from 2015 (The Order: 1886, Driveclub) still hold up because they prioritized cohesive aesthetics over pure horsepower. 4. The Optimization Crisis Hardware has advanced, but so has developer reliance on brute force. Some games now ship with broken performance, relying on DLSS and FSR to hit playable framerates. 5. The Future: More Than Pixels Graphics have improved...just not in ways that always wow us. Real-time global illumination, path tracing, and AI upscaling are impressive tech, but they don’t make a game feel next-gen the way Crysis once did. Perhaps the next big leap won’t be in visuals at all, but in AI-driven interactivity, physics, or dynamic worlds. Or maybe we’ve just reached the point where better graphics don’t mean better games. And if that’s the case maybe that’s okay.

292

54 Comments