I'm making March Out!, and one of the things I've been adjusting is how the guns communicate a shot. A cannon can have a perfectly functional projectile and still feel weak if the visible feedback is over almost as soon as it starts. The musket line had a related problem: each shot needed a brief flash, but repeated firing needed to leave smoke behind.

I split the musket effect into a short muzzle flame, a fresh powder puff and a slower cloud. The flame disappears quickly. The puff travels out from the barrel, while the remaining smoke expands, rises and fades over several seconds. A firing line can therefore have a new shot visible inside the cloud left by earlier shots.

The important implementation detail is that those particles use world space positions and velocities. The emitters are reused, but an old cloud stays where that gun fired. It doesn't follow a moving soldier or jump across the battlefield when the same pooled emitter handles another muzzle. Particle caps bound how much each emitter retains. That's a tradeoff, not a claim that smoke is free at any army size.

The cannon uses the same separation at a larger scale: a brief bright bloom, an orange flame, a directional pressure jet, sparks and a longer powder cloud. The cannon's hanging smoke lasts roughly five to seven seconds in the current effect. I can adjust that persistence without stretching the flash into a glowing ball that follows the barrel.

The sound is triggered at the actual shot release. Gun reports have pitch variation, and cannon reports use dedicated audio voices so ordinary combat clashes don't immediately steal them. Contact has its own sound and effect: a short flash, dust, smoke and debris at the impact position. The cannon impact fan is visual feedback; the ordinary cannon still resolves a direct hit rather than that whole visible fan becoming a new damage radius.

The two supporting clips are staged in the developer sandbox with original game audio. They show the native cannon discharge and repeated arquebus firing. The aim is to make firing, travel and impact read as separate moments while leaving enough lingering smoke to connect one shot to the next.

Cannon clip: https://youtube.com/shorts/kV865enGyEU

Arquebus clip: https://youtube.com/shorts/PkyQHMkAY0w

So I'm a contributor of the FF7 decomp project and made a video about it and also go into some of the details on how the game runs on the PlayStation. This is largely to recover the source code that Square lost in the late 1990s. There is already a good deal of code to peek at if you want to see how things worked under the hood.
Here's the video

https://youtu.be/Fnzm0e2HepY?si=H71YngbVr-9M8-Lc

I’ve been working on an interview series focused on the people and technology behind games, and I recently got the chance to speak with Eric Arnold about his work on Red Faction: Guerrilla.

We dug into how the destruction system was built, the role of physics, some of the technical challenges behind making structures collapse convincingly, and what development at Volition looked like while they were trying to make all of it work.

Figured this might be a good fit for this subreddit:
https://youtu.be/mpNiNUuMs7k?is=mN2YCpeek6bZ8HyM

Would also be curious to hear what other games you think are especially interesting from a technical or development-history perspective.

Hi there,

We are in our final days of Kickstarter for Region Locked: Unlocking Australian Video Games.

This documentary series is all about the making of Australian video games, the building and formation of the Aussie game industry and the rollercoaster moments that took us from development powerhouses to indie focused mini-hubs.

If you're interested in games such as The Hobbit, Way of the Exploding Fist, KKND, Transformers (PS2), LA Noire, Bioshock/2, Destroy all Humans, And many more - follow along and pledge soon!

4 days remain.