Drifting Sands
Armed with sword and bow, journey through the desert while seeking traces of your missing brother, fending off rival tribes.
The final game done in The Game Assembly’s in-house engine, TGE. This time around I worked outside of my comfort zone; my main areas for this game project were graphics and effects related.
However, since we used Unity as a level editor, I begun working on exporting data from the Unity Animator Controller into our game. It functioned by finding existing states in our characters underlying state machines to match the animation, and used the animation transitions when switching states.
I started off implementing shadow mapping to the game, to make the environment look less flat in the strong sunlight. It was a big task, so it was done together with my colleague, Daniel Berg. I learned a lot about applied graphics programming in C++, HLSL, and the DirectX 11 graphics pipeline, and proper planning helped us get started early and take our time to learn without stress from any hard deadlines.
I also worked on a particle emission system for our game. I wanted a way for our level designers and game artists to import an emitter created in the Unity ParticleSystemModule, directly into the engine. This worked well, and allowed us to iterate and preview particle emitters easily in Unity before testing them in-game.
Early version of importing data from the Unity Animator Controller, with animation blending.
Implement shadow mapping, teaching me how to add a large graphical programming element to a custom game engine
Creating a customizable particle system, focusing on replicating an API recognizable to game artists
All UI and menus, functional and visual aspects, working closely with game artists. Also created a subtitle system that can read from JSON files.
All responsibilities and skills:
Genre: Top-down Action-Adventure/Hack and slash
Engine: TGE (In-house engine at The Game Assembly)
Development time: 6 weeks at 50% (120 hours)
Group: 13 people: 5 game programmers, 4 game artists,
2 game animators, 2 level designers