I spent most of the week of its release playing through Genshin Impact, the new open-world anime RPG by Chinese developer Mihoyo that some people have compared to Breath of the Wild. (I will not compare it to Breath of the Wild, and in fact, in my sixty or so…

A questionable journey into compiling code backwards. — Over the past year, I’ve found myself in the strange position of trying to decompile C#. And not just decompile C# into something that looks more-or-less like source code — I’ve been trying to decompile C# into valid source code that I can then compile and use without modification. In…

Making fun with meshes — Lasers are cool. And drawing a laser in a straight line is easy enough: just plop down a sprite, maybe repeat it a few times, maybe stretch it. But what if you want curved lasers? And what if you want a hundred of them updating at 120 frames per second?

How game mechanics shift in significance — (No narrative spoilers.) Much has been said about the strange mechanic at the heart of Death Stranding — hiking through snowy mountains with a five-hundred pound stack of textbooks half-falling out of your backpack — especially on how fun it is. Some people think it’s not fun; other people say…

Bullet hell patterns can be incredibly complex, but as of today there isn’t really any way to succinctly describe them. The most basic element — the movement of a single object — is just a parametric equation, but everything on top of that is murky. How do you describe firing…

Unity’s Graphics.DrawMeshInstancedIndirect (from here on out, just DMII) is an absolute necessity for making danmaku games in Unity. At the same time, nobody seems to know what it is or how it works. As one of the confused, I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this, but hopefully it can help future…

A few months ago, I wrote a somewhat disappointed review of Remnant: From the Ashes, in which I suggested that the goal of “Dark Souls with guns” might be best served by 2D games with combat loops based on the danmaku (bullet hell) genre. Given the ever-increasing proliferation of Soulslike…

Since Dark Souls first stunned the gaming community with its grueling-yet-fair combat centered around swords, axes, and halberds, one question has always lingered: can we make it with guns? There have been but few attempts at this challenge. Remnant: From the Ashes is the second one I know of (after…

This week, I played through Xenoblade Chronicles X (the 1.5th game in the series). A few hours after putting down the controller for good, I thought back to all the unique encounters and boss fights I had seen in the game — when I realized that I couldn’t remember a…