Spite: Parasite

This game project was made at TGA. Using a custom engine + particle editor made by our programmers. My role in this was as one of the two technical artists. The main tasks I had were writing HLSL shaders for HUD, post-process effects like the vignette and creating VFX but also building a few smaller tools with blueprint in Unreal engine and blender BPY. Some of my responsibilities as TA are also debugging and solving graphical issues when they arise.

• Group size: 18.
• Time: 9 weeks, half-time.

One of my main tasks was the animated HUD elements like the swirling HP/Mana orbs, enemy HP bars and displaying the cool-down effect  for the abilities.

In the code snippet below I show how I animated the cool-down mask.

//cooldown mask
float progress = 1.f - UIOB_CustomValues.x; This value controls the progression of the mask Range(0.0 to 1.0)
float2 pos = uv - float2(0.5, 0.5);
float angle = fmod(radians(450) + atan2(pos.y, pos.x), radians(360));
float value = angle / radians(360);
float mask = step(value, progress);

The fog was made by creating meshes over the level's floor and sampling the transparent fog textures twice so they can be panning across each other to avoid a stiff moving fog.

float2 panUVOne = float2(uv.x + (uvOffsetOneX * (time * 0.05)), uv.y + (uvOffsetOneY * (time * 0.05)));
float2 panUVTwo = float2(uv.x + (uvOffsetTwoX * (time * 0.05)), uv.y + (uvOffsetTwoY * (time * 0.05)));
float3 fogTexOne = AlbedoTexture.Sample(DefaultSampler, panUVOne).rgb;
float3 fogTexTwo = AlbedoTexture.Sample(DefaultSampler, panUVTwo).rgb;

Here are some of the particle effects I worked on like ground markers for the boss attacks, blue particles from the players abilities/attacks, blood and dust.

A very tiny peek into the particle editor I was working in.

We use Unreal Engine as a level editor and export our levels to our engine. This makes it easier for our artists and level designers to work and iterate on the game but it also gives me the possibility to create some tools. In our game there is a bunch of roots everywhere so instead of having an artist sit and create multiple models of roots, I made a blueprint they can use in Unreal and then convert the roots to an .fbx so the assets could be exported to our engine.

The root tool was a pretty standard spline tool but with a clamp for the max size on the start and end point to make the root taper off.