Joni Korpi
@jonikorpi
Finnish gamedev & webdev. Posting about design, UI, art, procedural generation, audio synthesis & everything else involved. I hate AI. Working on a tactics RPG. Announcing soon. Site: Mastodon:
Ok, I'm done with the game. The ending was a bit weird. Still one of the greatest games, and I loved it. Here's one final blast of nice screenshots, as spoiler-free as possible.
Neat custom lighting trick: if the boy is directly between the camera and a strong light source, he turns into a black silhouette. Looks incredible at times, and works as an eerie callback to the previous games.
The Last Guardian doesn't exactly run perfectly all the time, but it's a small price to pay for a world like this. These seem to all be real geometry. Very 3D, and not exactly low-poly. Even the skybox-looking cliff in the far horizon seemed real when I got close. Such strong presence.
For those who don't know: this is The Last Guardian, sequel to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. People said bad things about it on release, so many including me never played it. Shouldn't have listened. I started a few days ago and it's already my favourite out of the three.
Oh my god. I was trying to take an aesthetic video of the scenery and the camera turned on its own. Absolutely perfect encapsulation of this game.
Addicted to The Last Guardian. Love my catbirdgoat friend. What a stupendously good game. The camera though… almost as bad as in Ico. Gives my wife motion sickness from just watching, which is a huge bummer. Games need to pay more attention to camera accessibility.
Catching up on some classics I've never played this summer. Just finished Ico. A masterclass in letting and enabling the player figure out what to do. Terrible camera. And wonderfully intimate core mechanics, which I'm surprised to not have seen used as strongly since then.
Oh cool, adding a weight axis took like 10 minutes. The grid kind of made it obvious how the shape should embolden: up from the baseline and down from the x-height line, but always sliding along the hex grid.
No idea what I'm doing but the overall shape of this glyph feels pretty neat. Maybe there's something there if I can just redraw it with curves. "Now draw the rest of the owl" vibes….
Neat thing I didn't know about fonts: they use integers! Each glyph in Fontra uses a 1000x1000 canvas by default, but you can change it. At ~16x16 it feels like a fun little puzzle. Low-poly modelling with integer positions, but the vertices are actually cubic spline control points.
But I don't want to make a literal pixel font, so I'm going to treat the pixels more like a grid and apply techniques from procedural terrain generation. Things like: dual grid tiles (image from @oskarstalberg.bsky.social), tile deformation, hex grid variant for italics, and so on. Should be fun.
Speaking of colour, I'm liking the combos you can pick for Rhinoshield's SolidX cases. Whoever chose these options knew their stuff.
Another one of those things traditional artists solved ages ago: just make the night out of cold hues instead of black. They don't have to be dark, and not necessarily even desaturated if you oversaturate the light. Outlines and/or rim lights help a lot too.
The sans version of Avona is also more fun with radial repetition. Could actually use some of these as icons…. /cc @arcanetype.com
Doodling branding some more before running off to summer vacation, I remembered I also have a license to an unfinished sans version of Avona. More of a display font than the serif, so it can make a logo that pulls more attention. This layout could be fun if I smooth out the touching bits?
The lowercase "w" happens to tile really well into a hexagon shape. Looks a bit like roots growing underground. Also runic and mild horror vibes? The "o" as the eye doesn't quite fit here, but shows this could be turned into an Eye of Sauron type of thing.
What I like most about Anthropeum is being exposed to random art from times, places and trades I'd normally never run into. Just look at this little bugger! Straight out of Shadow of the Colossus.
The landforms in this one feel very "readable" somehow? Like it'd be fun to traverse this area? Maybe it's the gentle slopes contrasting with the upward-pointing forest tiles.
The way the plateaus meet here is so good this one is still my social media banner, despite being from 2023.
Looking at screenshots from old #gamedev prototypes. Most look crude now after learning so much, but there are also some happy accidents in here that still look great. The colours in this one are just the right kind of frosty.
OFFBEAT: you get a sequencer in the mail. It has no manual. You connect it to your cat piano. store.steampowered.com/app/44...
Played a lot of Steam demos this week. Posting my favourites in this thread. Entropy is the culmination of a trend I noticed: the uglier (for lack of a better word) the game was the better it was. Bizarre RPG with brilliant writing, dripping with intention. store.steampowered.com/app/39...