Till Death Do Us Part
This was my third and final game project I worked on at TGA along with my other Tech Artists, Jonas and Keiren. This time around we were given complete freedom on what type of 3D game we wanted to make, so we decided on making a first person horror game inspired by Resident Evil 7 for gameplay and The Shining for the environment. The project was 9 weeks long (8 hour days) and we were a team of 23 people. My responsibilities for this project were tools, VFX, shaders and the ragdoll pipeline. The VFX were made in our custom game engine and the shaders were done in HLSL.
The game is playable on itch.io: https://whiplashstudio.itch.io/till-death-do-us-part
In-game screenshots.
Layered/Composite Material I made for our project. I made the shader both in unreal for the artists to use as well as the hlsl code for our game engine that collected the infromation from the unreal material and applied in game. The purpose of this tool was to speed up our Artists pipeline by not having to make unique textures for every asset, as well as saving memory by reusing a library of tileable textures the artist created.
The Pipe Spline Tool was created mainly for the basment level of the game. I iterated on the tool along with Marcus, who created the pipe meshes, where we made adjustments to pivot points and UVs in a way that would simplify the work I needed to do in blueprints.
The Ragdoll Pipeline came late in the project and was more of a spontaneous solution I came up with when I passed by my level designers placeing skeletal meshes. The original plan was that the animatiors were going to pose the zombies by hand, but at the time they were overburdened with animation work. So I iterated a few ideas I had and managed to eventually export an animation to maya and then back to our game engine. Once we knew this worked I spent time getting the constraints right on the physics asset.
The Blood Splatter Post Effect was requested by the group because we wanted to have as litte UI as possible. I was inspired by Call of Duty and how they show health as blood on the screen
The Gun Smoke was done to provide the user with a visual que that the last round in the clip has been fired. Initially the solution I thought of first was to have ribbons with an upwards force but our VFX editor did not allow forces to be applied on ribbons. So instead I came up with this solution with a cone mesh with a panning texture and vertex shader.
The Bullet Impact Effect has a few emitters for things like smoke, sparks and dust. Initially I thought the debris could just be small meshes, but I chose to make imposters instead since it would have less polygons but still react to light the way a meshe would. I also wanted them to be sprites because Svante had recently made particle collisions work but only with sprites.
