Lightning Rod Games
@lightningrod.bsky.social
Cute, thoughtful, and creative describes both our team and our games.
Love a good beard, but sometimes different normals across adjacent meshes give you an unwanted one. Here's how to fix it with @blender.org and the DataTransfer modifier. Add the modifier to one of the meshes and have it target the mesh with the normals you want to copy. Fixed! #gamedev #gameart
February 5, 2026 at 10:45 PM
Love a good beard, but sometimes different normals across adjacent meshes give you an unwanted one. Here's how to fix it with @blender.org and the DataTransfer modifier. Add the modifier to one of the meshes and have it target the mesh with the normals you want to copy. Fixed! #gamedev #gameart
January 29, 2026 at 10:41 PM
In #Unity3D, you need to worry about dependencies. If a scene references an asset, it will get loaded into memory (EVEN IF HIDDEN). We broke our game into hundreds of environment-only scenes that can be dynamically loaded, and then made tools so we could work without creating dependencies. #gamedev
January 29, 2026 at 9:49 PM
Real-time shadows go a long way to help characters feel connected to the environment. Sadly, you can't always afford them (computationally). Blob or projector shadows are a good solution, and having multiple levels of projector shadows (for body, feet, etc.) are even better. #gamedev #gameart
January 27, 2026 at 5:26 PM
Was digging through some old assets and found this from a one-pager for A Fold Apart. Thought it was cute and worth posting. So much work went into the characters and the shape language of the game. It seems simple and obvious because it took a lot of work to get it that way. #gamedev #gameart
January 27, 2026 at 3:17 AM
Playing through to look for problems and found a couple. Can you spot the artifacting because one shader doesn't have double-sided global illumination? #gamedev #gameart #afoldapart (yes, I did add that hashtag just because it rhymed 😌)
January 21, 2026 at 8:03 PM
Playing through to look for problems and found a couple. Can you spot the artifacting because one shader doesn't have double-sided global illumination? #gamedev #gameart #afoldapart (yes, I did add that hashtag just because it rhymed 😌)
January 21, 2026 at 3:22 PM
January 21, 2026 at 4:00 AM
January 16, 2026 at 1:53 AM
Happy New Year 😘
January 6, 2026 at 1:50 AM
Happy New Year 😘
It's important to know where to stop. How much will people really look at the background water? They'll probably be reading the text messages. Doesn't that dialogue look compelling!? #gamedev #indiedev #gameart
December 29, 2025 at 4:15 AM
December 28, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Lightning Rod Games
A Fold Apart used emissive glow so the player stood out in puzzles on small screens. They popped too much on big ones though. I wanted to try fresnel edge glow, but it made the character look like a cutout. But then adding a smoothstep to the world normal y made them pop AND blend #unity3d #gamedev
December 17, 2025 at 5:45 PM
Some beautiful stuff in here! #indiegame
This has been a long week but I will make a list of 50 indie games that are:
From this awards voting year (Nov 2024 - Nov 2025)
Not covered by the awards show
Deserve your attention
From this awards voting year (Nov 2024 - Nov 2025)
Not covered by the awards show
Deserve your attention
New rule this year: If you post "Play more indie games" during the game awards, you are required to make a thread recommending 50 of them.
December 17, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Some beautiful stuff in here! #indiegame
Reposted by Lightning Rod Games
A composer sent me their portfolio and they used AI images as the visuals for their tracks on YouTube. My gut reaction was that the music was AI too. I suppressed that reaction, did some digging, and figured the music was legit, BUT that first impression put a stink on the whole thing.
Every writer who generates a slop image for their work is a class traitor.
"I can't afford a visual artist"
So your solution is stabbing artists in the back? Stealing from them?
Furthermore, slop-generated imagery suggests slop-generated writing. That's how you're presenting yourself.
"I can't afford a visual artist"
So your solution is stabbing artists in the back? Stealing from them?
Furthermore, slop-generated imagery suggests slop-generated writing. That's how you're presenting yourself.
December 16, 2025 at 9:31 PM
A composer sent me their portfolio and they used AI images as the visuals for their tracks on YouTube. My gut reaction was that the music was AI too. I suppressed that reaction, did some digging, and figured the music was legit, BUT that first impression put a stink on the whole thing.
The time and resource crunch meant A Fold Apart, though very pretty, was left with some rough edges. We took some time to port it to #unity3d 6 and I've been looking at what it would take to bring back some of the rendering techniques we had to set aside for performance. #gamedev #devlog #indiedev
December 16, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Lightning Rod Games
At the start, A Fold Apart was thought to be too complex to work on mobile hardware, but a series of coincidences set the groundwork to make it possible. A thread. #gamedev #indiedev #devlog
A Fold Apart had a tricky dev cycle. It was first intended to be a PC/Console game. This was mostly because I thought the amount of runtime math required to fold the paper, and the magical paper effects relying on GPU fill-rate, would make it impossible on mobile hardware. But then...
December 15, 2025 at 6:43 PM
A Fold Apart had a tricky dev cycle. It was first intended to be a PC/Console game. This was mostly because I thought the amount of runtime math required to fold the paper, and the magical paper effects relying on GPU fill-rate, would make it impossible on mobile hardware. But then...
December 15, 2025 at 6:39 PM
A Fold Apart had a tricky dev cycle. It was first intended to be a PC/Console game. This was mostly because I thought the amount of runtime math required to fold the paper, and the magical paper effects relying on GPU fill-rate, would make it impossible on mobile hardware. But then...
Reposted by Lightning Rod Games
We are not hiring, but I was responding to cold-call apps. today and it occurred to me that I need to be taking precautions against AI in that process. This skepticism is going to hurt juniors a lot! 2D artists might need to put extra work into their portfolios to prove they're real, and that sucks.
Yo! So first up: Fuck AI
With that out of the way, the Fortnite AI thing has raised a question in me that I have kept asking for the past year or so, despite there not being an answer -
1/3
With that out of the way, the Fortnite AI thing has raised a question in me that I have kept asking for the past year or so, despite there not being an answer -
1/3
December 1, 2025 at 5:35 PM
We are not hiring, but I was responding to cold-call apps. today and it occurred to me that I need to be taking precautions against AI in that process. This skepticism is going to hurt juniors a lot! 2D artists might need to put extra work into their portfolios to prove they're real, and that sucks.
Absolute monsters 😱
November 21, 2025 at 10:50 PM
Absolute monsters 😱
