Shattered

Silent Hill 2 Inspired

<insert trailer when ready>

For Game Project 7 we were tasked with creating a third person game so we chose to do a Silent Hill 2 inspired horror game. This game was developed from December to April. Our group is called INK INC and in total we are 17 developers, my Technical Artist partner throughout the game project was Alexander Thambert.

As our previous game Spite - To Hel And Back was entirely focused on VFX I asked early on to be able to have more varied tasks for this project. I still did some VFX primarily in a particle editor created by one of our programmers Tobias Garpenhall but a larger focus was put on shaders and tools.

I got to create a variety of shaders for this project and all of them are written in HLSL. Shaders created include TV screen, Crosshair, Glint for interactables, Godrays from lamps and the player flashlight.

Another big area that I worked on was a cable tool which I made in Houdini. Early on in the project I prototyped a potential tool for generating the building/interior which didn't end up being used. However it did give me useful knowledge in making a HDA (Houdini Digital Asset) that works in Unreal Engine 5. With this I started creating a cable tool that could use a spline to simulate a cable hanging from the ceiling, this tool was in ongoing development throughout most of the project from early prototyping to the final version. I installed the tool along with Houdini Engine on our Level Designers computers so that they could make use of it to place out the cables as a guiding tool in the game. I additionally UV mapped the cable in the tool and created textures that could be applied to the cables. Hopefully now that my knowledge on creating and implementing tools for other people has improved it can also be used in future projects.

A few VFX were also created for the game so I'll just quickly mention them. Dust Particles underneath lamps, Flies flying around & some Sparks from lamps and cables. The big difference from Spite was that these VFX were created in a Particle Editor as well as the effects attempting to be more realistic visually.

I think this project gave me a better understanding of how to work as a technical artist both in terms of collaboration for the creation of tools but also in more varied tasks with shaders & VFX. 

Spite - To Hel And Back

Diablo III Inspired

This game was made for the course Game Project 5 & 6 and was developed from early September to early December of 2024. Our group is called INK INC and in total we are 17 developers, my Technical Artist partner throughout the game project was Alexander Thambert.

This game was very VFX heavy so all of my work throughout it was working on a large number of visual effects for the player, enemies, boss & environments. We did not make use of a particle system for this game as we decided early on that it wasn't necessary to dedicate time towards it's development since we use a custom engine developed by our programmers. The visual effects were created in a Modelviewer which has some custom parameters for Colors, Integers & Floats which proved useful for tweaking effects once they were tested in engine. The Modelviewer was mainly developed by Axel Franzén.

The visual effects were typically either flipbooks which were rendered from EmberGen which is a program I got quite familiar with throughout this project or a combination of scrolling textures and noise driven by shader logic. Because of our custom engine the shaders are written in HLSL, sometimes I would prototype the effects in Unreal Engine or Maya ShaderFX but as I got more familiar with HLSL most of the effects were written directly as code. I also made some environmental VFX such as fog, fire & candles for the environments. Most of the textures and noises for the VFX were generated in Substance Designer.

I also got to create some breakable pots in Houdini which was fun!

Overall it was a rewarding project which lead to a enjoyable game, this was my first real venture into VFX and I think it improved my skills overall. However due to the large amount of VFX created through the project there was limited time to polish some of them.