joe wintergreen internet zone

in 2002, the kids at school were all playing it. i tried it and thought it was bad in 2013, i was on a tram, and this bloke came sprinting onto the tram screaming “FUCK FUCK FUCK”, ripped open an old hp laptop carry case, opened the laptop, “FUCK FUCK FUC…

A million years ago, in 2014, I was working on a game called Spacething about renovating a sentient spaceship.

A while back I had a quick go at modding Doom 3, with a view to turning a cutscene early on in the game into a Half-Life style scripted sequence.

today i awoke without any mental health, having been hit sorta harder than usual of late by various upsetting world news, and grief, and whatever else, so after getting a few little things done at work i took the rest of the day off, and went to the park…

I guess they just had the State Of Unreal at Unrealfest, and as predicted, it was a real fuckfest full of dogshit.

MetalPetal asked: Hello Joe.

Vivian Rosanthwyn asked: hey joe, did you ever have an engineer that truly was wonderful to work with, an engineer that got out of your way when you worked on design, or like, an engineer that specifically helped you thrive as a designer in a project?

Like twelve years ago I was working on a first-person adventure game of some sort, initially on UE3 and then 4, where you’d drive a car.

Eric asked: In that post you shared in your retro graphics blog, you mention that the sweet spot for you was the 2010s AAA graphics.

someone asked: I’m considering moving to the Doom 3 engine from Godot.

someone asked: You mentioned that you don’t care for “actively retro graphics” is there a reason why?

It’s now been over 10 years since I started getting a reputation for bitching and moaning about the state of Level Design Tools, starting with my first talk-into-mic youtube video, Level Editing In UE4 Needs To Catch Up To Quake 1, and then a bit later the

The level scripting system I described building in a previous blog post is now available to buy, and it’s called JoeIO, so you can use it in your games.

when i was about 7, my family bought an ’89 tarago from a place called “just buses”. they had put a sticker on the back of it that said “just buses” in kind of a sexy cursive font, not as one whole sticker but a letter at a time. i peeled them off, rearra…

a brainworm i acquired as a child: in the late 90s in australia there was some incremental upgrade to eftpos card scanners rolled out, where you’d swipe your card and not have to wait as long, and every checkout for years had faded stickers on there that…

in Skyrim, Skooma is a hard drug of some sort that ruins lives, but Skyrim doesn’t do anything with it mechanically, it just gives you a little bit of stamina. the item is totally out of sync with the lore!

This week I built a Source Engine style input/output (I/O) system for level scripting in Sleight of Hand, and if you don’t know what that is or means, you have that in common with most game developers.

I haven’t played Team Fortress 2 in years and years, but I think of the map tc_hydro pretty often, at once launch-TF2’s least popular map (apparently) and, I reckon, its finest hour aesthetically.

A tool I made a long time ago with a little help from the excellent Turfster is my Vector Field Painter, made to be used in VR.

In the early-mid 90s my dad ran a PC repair business, which I get the impression he spun up in advance of knowing much about PCs and more or less learned on the job.

In 1997 or so, I remember that my mum could use a computer pretty good.

Sometimes kids in their teens or early 20s rock up in my discord, and stay for years, and become adults.

I’ve been working for the last week or two on a system to streamline contextual or scripted animation stuff in Sleight of Hand, a stealth game with a lot of systemic interaction aspirations.

I just completed Gears of War 1 Reloaded, a remaster of a remaster (lol same), and it ends with a train level.

I recently made a second attempt at playing Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, having disliked it the first time, but they have patched it in interesting ways and this time it got its hooks in.

i had a dream a while back in which i was playing a leaked build of an old cancelled deus ex game called Staves Eco, where dx’s neural augmentations existed, but had had generative AI non-optionally patched in in an over-the-air update. it was concerned w…

I’ve worked with a few “target-based” contextual interaction systems for NPCs on different projects, they’re one of my favourite things to make, and lately I’ve been making one for Sleight of Hand, a stealth game I’m working on at RiffRaff, deets of which…

An uncomfortable pattern I’ve noticed in workplaces and relationships over the years is that even (what I believe to be) genuinely well-intentioned men (I only see it with men) find themselves resorting to gaslighting at the drop of a hat in relatively lo…

in my capacity as a non-artist, i typically refrain from drawing any pictures. the pictures below, drawn in ballpoint pen (or some of them on an ipad), are exceptions. it’s my contention that perspective is for messy bitches so as a put-together ho i don’t

about a week ago, wonderful Oscar the cat, my best friend of 14 years, passed away in my arms in the garden. i caught him as a feral kitten living under my house when i was 21, and he was the sweetest creature anyone has ever known. this week has been awf…

Some years ago I did a quest scripting tool for an ill-fated open-world game I was contracting on.

Many years ago when I was a tiny baby making InFlux (of which there is now a Redux), I had no idea what I wanted to do with it narratively, if anything.

yeah so i was playing no man’s sky once and i was on a space station and suddenly every vert’s position on one of the horizontal axes collapsed to 0 and it looked like this. i could see dudes running around. cool bug

this is my favourite kind of spider because it visibly goes on adventures and this i feel is a very good example of that. you can see the thought process. she is vibing if you watch for a while you will see her see a leaf standing on end like a tower and…

I’ve written before about – even though I’m a huge longtime Remedy enjoyer – not liking Control very much, but wanting to like it.

i’m probably only seeing this as worth the moan because i’m hungry, but game dev twitter/masto/whatever is so unbearable for the condescending way garbage advice is constantly framed as universally-applicable hard truths that it’s Time For You To Acknowle…

The Weird West side project (called Overdrive) that I started working on some time back is something I rarely find the time to advance, despite having a lot of ideas about, but lately I have a little bit.

The recent Metal Gear Solid 3 remake uses a lot of Quixel Megascans (a mostly-free library of ultra-high-fidelity photogrammetry), which I don’t think matters at all in itself, but it’s funny that the bit of wood Snake bites down on when he splints his el…

As my Ass Creed quest continues, I’ve now played through 1, 2, Brotherhood, Revelations, 3, 4 (Black Flag), and Unity, the whole “Desmond Trilogy” and then some.

Mark asked: Hi Joe!

I’m on a bit of an Assassin’s Creed odyssey lately (not playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just on an odyssey through Assassin’s Creed), going in a weird order – I’ve just completed the first game a few days after completing Unity, which is sort of the last

The first feature I worked on at Wolfeye when I came on board as (what ended up being credited as) a Systems Designer/Technical Designer was the vultures.

I am once again aimlessly enjoying the Unreal level design tool Scythe, which I get to test early builds of.

A while ago I made a cool effect for Sleight of Hand, where (since you hide in clouds of smoke sometimes in this magic-themed game), we were experimenting with a type of lantern that guards could carry around and it would dispel any smoke or fog around the

When it comes to the Steam Deck, InFlux Redux is now verified, thanks to an update I put out a few weeks ago and then several smaller updates over a few more weeks where I tweaked the size of text on various UI elements to be one pixel larger.

Porygon asked (on the Steam community hub): Am I the only one who has the movement physics feel… off sometimes?

I continue to spend time screwing around in Scythe.

So you’re hiring for a technical role, and you end up comparing two people.

So I put a little message on there like: “hey if you torrent this and like it i’d appreciate it if you bought it if you can”, and a bunch of pirates went and bought it on itch, and some of ’em even tipped more than the price of the game. it was a $10 game,

It’s true and weird that while both Half-Life games are considered influential and important, hardly any of what was uniquely compelling about them made it into anything else.