Gavin Clayton

So sorry Joe. It hurts so much to lose these perfect innocent beings

Mate this is a huge achievement, I'm so stoked for you!

It no longer sits right with me to have a Patreon page while I'm not in this full-time, and will be closing this at end of month. I'm grateful to all of the people who pledged in the last year and helped buy me some coffees and pay some bills. Thank you so much! ❤️

After a year of working full-time independent on my game, I've been fortunate enough to pick up some great part-time work. This provides me more financial security and some resources to help self-fund development into the future.

Asset manager can now import a mix of files and folders while preserving source hierarchy on import. Asset builders are multithreaded and run even while files are being copied, so whole process completes in about the same amount of time as file copy, including thumbnails for textures and models.

Deep Engine drag-and-drop several hundred FBX model files into asset manager

The hardest thing for me so far is making the editor something inside the game rather than the other way around. e.g. being able to change an asset file and see it build and update directly while game is running takes some real work to do compared with a static, immutable asset bundle.

I don't believe it's much harder than any other engine. I had to build a lot of bespoke game systems for DFU, and there's always the problem of not being able to plan for everything. Keeping the moving parts small and relatively self-contained with sensible interfaces is good. Experience helps.

If I understand the question, this will depend on the system. Unlike DFU, this game will use a sandbox and scripting language like Lua (TBD). I'll need to open up systems to modders via interfaces. Or did you mean something else on my side re. engine development? :)

My plan is to start a rolling tools demo on Itch soon, so that I can get feedback on stability, etc. It will be limited to just asset builders at first, then I'll open up something new each drop. Patrons will get first look at each release, followed by a public release once I'm happy with it.

Yes. :) The engine tools run inside the game and can be pulled up at any time to view state, drag in assets, and build mods. Everyone will be able to use the tools, just keep in mind it's more of an internal creator platform for my game, not a general purpose game engine like say Unity or Unreal.

Setting up a modal progress dialog so editor can display progress after user drags and drops a large number of asset files into engine.

Congrats my guy! :D

What's most interesting about this is the editor isn't a standalone app, it's embedded into the game's runtime. The goal is to enable modders to make runtime changes and see them instantly without restarting game (wherever possible). Then package and distribute mods to players as prebuilt bundles.

Early stage of Deep Engine's asset rebuild and hot-load in action. After editing and saving image file, the build system detects change to source file and rebuilds it into a texture asset based on current meta properties. Note editor thumbnails on left update after image is saved.

I haven't posted a blog update in several weeks now, but I have been working hard across several fronts! This blog post catches up on what I've been doing and where I'm headed next.
dev.interkarma.net/2025/05/02/m...

Up until now, my engine's asset compiler has been a single-threaded command line tool, and a real pain to use. Fully integrating the whole thing into the editor UI makes it faster and easier, overall improving my daily life working with assets.

Making an editor front-end for asset compiler. Asset builders are now multithreaded, so an expanding log reader is required to solve the problem of linear output becoming interleaved from different threads executing in parallel. I can also highlight any build errors directly in the editor.

Making some big improvements to asset browsing. In addition to thumbnail view, it will now support lists and trees and more filtering options.
Also built a new tree view control that's fully virtual and can scroll hundreds of thousands of items without slowing down.

Just a heads-up that I'm changing hosting providers for dfworkshop.net and interkarma.net. They will go down over the few days as I move everything over.

I started with 6502 assembly on a C64. Practically every aspect of modern game development feels like streamlined productivity magic to me.

I really want to become more proficient in Blender. Following some courses and immersing myself in practise each day. Right now learning how to model a detailed human figure and I'm slowly becoming more confident with the tools. Best way to learn is to make mistakes and fix them.

Animation retargeting now working well enough to throw all kinds of animations at all kinds of models. This whole process was really involved. I had to set up a retargeting pipeline to handle joint-to-joint mapping, pose correction, and proportion correction.

Revisiting and improving animation retargeting in my engine. Looking forward to supporting more animation inputs.

Really happy with my procedural sky so far. Shadows lengthen and shorten as the sun disc arcs from dawn to dusk. Clouds are lit by sun's direction as they drift and evolve throughout the day. The skybox colours light environment based on time of day. It's a good base to build on!

Spent the last two days in cyclone prep - trimming trees near house, cleaning gutters, securing what I can. Now feeling completely physically drained. Put in about two hours of gamedev today and I'm spent. Just going to crack a beer and watch the storm roll in from this arvo.

In the path here, I spent this morning doing all the things like cutting back trees, cleaning gutters, etc. Likely will be fine but worth the bit of effort to prepare just in case.

I forgot to mention - new sky system casts shadows over terrain that move as the sun tracks across the sky throughout the day. I'll do a proper pass on this once distant terrain is further along. It's not much, it just adds a little extra something.

Working on sky colour gradients that are a bit more "grounded" by reality, then I'll finish animation of day night skies. These skies aren't going to win any technical achievement awards, but they can sometimes make pretty background vistas, and I'm OK with that.

Working on game time and day/night cycles. An animated sun disc follows directional light as it rotates through the sky. Also animating environment light intensity on a curve. Now to animate sky colour gradients and a few other refinements, and I'm done with skies for a bit.