In the game I'm working on, Corvian Curse, death is not uncommon. Sometimes a lot can be happening and your run is suddenly over. If you weren't paying attention you might have missed what killed you. Without knowing why your run ended it can feel unfair and you lose an opportunity to learn from your death. Because of this we wanted to give the players a replay of the moments leading up to the...

_If you just want to jump to the new system feel free to skip to the design_ My game Corvian Curse started as a quick jam game where I just wanted to test procedural level generation for a 2D platformer, in a similar vein to Spelunky. Once I had the level gen dialed in I set out to make a simple character controller and the obvious choice in Godot was to use a CharacterBody2D. Eventually I wanted...

Recently at `$job` I spent a Hackweek making Rust ready for production deployments. Part of that was figuring out what builds were going to look like. One of the really nice things about developing Rust code is the included package manager, `cargo`, and all of the crates available at crates.io. One especially nice feature of crates.io, compared to other package repositories I have experience...

_This is part 3 of a 3 part series on 2D Pixel Shaders. For part 1 click here, for part 2 click here._ At the end of our last lesson we'd learned a bit about how to modify pixel shaders based on color information and coordinate information. We went through some really cool effects but some of them weren't especially efficient considering all of the conditional statements that it would go through...

_This is part 2 of a 3 part series on 2D Pixel Shaders. For part 1 click here, for part 3 click here._ When left off we had just implemented our grayscale shader. Just as a reminder, since we'll be building on this function, this is what the PixelShaderFunction looked like. ```csharp float4 PixelShaderFunction(float2 coords: TEXCOORD0) : COLOR0 { float4 color = tex2D(s0, coords); color.gb...

_This is part 1 of a 3 part series on 2D Pixel Shaders. For part 2 click here, for part 3 click here._ In this post I plan to show you how to setup the most simple of pixel shaders using HLSL with XNA 4.0. In addition to the code here you can find some full examples on BitBucket. Feel free to fork and push back more examples. For a quick view on the shaders i'll be implementing you can take a...