Marcus and I went to HorrorCon to pass out business cards and make connections. I could talk about two of the people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

The first CosmoLair business cards!

These were the business cards we were handing out at HorrorCon. It had two designs for the

Vincent, creator of Vindicated Games, happened to recognize my friend, Marcus, as we were wandering the isles of HorrorCon. Through the interaction, I’d found someone doing a similar thing to what I’m doing, and we found we had a lot in common, and could talk in a way that works well between the creative mindset and business mindset. We’d agree to work on some projects together and later meet up on Discord.

Vincent

I had to ask him for his picture because I forgot to take a picture with him at the convention.

John Allemand is a considered a senior in the animation industry, as he has done all kinds of work on all the 90s and 2000s animations. Some of what he’s done was storyboarding and background work. Some notable shows he’s worked on were: Courage The Cowardly Dog, K.N.D. Kids Next Door, G.K.N.D. Galactic Kids Next Door (unreleased), and Chuggington. As I was going through the pages of his books, I got to see the original works of his background design, and got to hear his process of creating them as well as other experiences in the industry. I’d learnt some new ideas thanks to John, and taken inspiration especially from his environmental design work in Chuggington to utilize in Project Styx. He encouraged me to take pictures of the pages I liked for reference. He even said that we should include him as an NPC in the game, which was very cool. He wants to be a guy drawing in a book at some bar with a glass of Guinness. I’ll keep that in mind when I’m designing NPCs! ;P

Pictures taken of John Allemand's environmental design work for Chuggington.

Marcus and I got to take pictures with John.

We’d later run into him at a nearby bar where HorrorCon was holding their afterparty on Saturday. We’d drink and talking as we’d talk about our projects, experiences, interests, and stuff happening in the industry. I found that John and I were similar in that we were both a little awkward in social environments and tend to show ourselves through our work. However, I’d apparently made it look like I was good at conversations with how I eased him into a conversation with a group of people to get them talking. Here’s to hoping we can share a drink again sometime!

Coming back from HorrorCon, I was dead tired, but satisfied. I’d spend some time at home winding down for a couple days, watching A Certain Magical Index. I’d later finish optimizing the current functionality for the player blueprint and update the project to Unreal Engine 5.4.4. One of the big things was to begin working on a state machine for the player, soas to be better organized in the player’s programming, as well as to split some things into different tick groups, allowing for better framerates. There was already a significant boost in performance when I’d separated the targeting system into an actor component within the player. And even more improvement upon sorting through the calculations supporting the player movement. I’d also decided to turn off Nanite for the project. For those who don’t know Nanite, it basically serves as a dynamic Level of Detail slider for a mesh, lowering the level of detail the further away from the object the camera is. The thing about it is that it adds an extra layer of processing that we don’t think is necessary for our project, as we can just use the Level-of-Detail feature in Unreal Engine as is, and that will be the better option for mobile platforms.

CosmoLair goes to HorrorCon!

FreeRoam & Multiplayer

Move-Techs, Networking & Networking