Alien Age
|
|
Alien Age was a short term team building project. The goal was to produce and ship a game in a few months as proof of concept for a startup studio. We published under the name Indie Wizards, which rolled into the ownership of Left Turn Studios when the company officially formed.
The lead designer, Robert Grasso, kept a vlog of the development process on YouTube. More details of the project can be found on his website.
My contributions were:
The lead designer, Robert Grasso, kept a vlog of the development process on YouTube. More details of the project can be found on his website.
My contributions were:
- Spaceship rig, implement animations
- Tractor beam VFX and implementation of various states
- All VFX
- Lighting in 4 stages
- Shaders and materials for all assets
- includes custom water shader, custom fog, color-variation environment tile shader
- Procedural environment decorators - created variations of foliage tilesets and collaborated with Engineer to implement a procedural system to randomly select and rotate them for more variation
- Asset optimization including retopologizing and mesh cleanup, indexed textures, and customs shader/materials to reduce texture lookups
Final visuals
Above: final version of the visuals. Below: state of the project when I joined. I had a hand in nearly every visual improvement (major exception being UI).
State of the visuals when I joined the project
VFX Samples
Materials and Shaders
Shader to obscure the edge of the water without hiding the skybox. I like it better than Unity's built in fog. It's applied to a large sphere with inverted normals.
|
|
Shader that alters the colors on the ground tiles randomly, seeded by their world position. There's properties for color to blend with, strength, and contrast. I'm also going to use a similar shader on clouds so they're not all the same even though they share a material.
|
|
Tools
Created 8 varieties of tilesets using 6 individual asset models (3 trees, 3 rocks), to procedurally populate the world with foliage.
Worked with an engineer to develop a tool to quickly iterate through these layout prefabs and populate and rotate them for a larger variety in the world that doesn't look duplicated. We did this in editor instead of runtime to reduce load times. Since some other gameplay tiles get procedurally placed at runtime,
the foliage is on a separate game object that is turned off for those tiles so there is no overlap.
Because of the limitations of the prefab cloning system in Unity, we needed to be able to clear and re-generate the foliage when there were updates to the prefabs. This allowed us to iterate on the shaders/materials, layouts, and any necessary physics.
Documented the usage of the tool so that level designers could generate and re-populate these when the world layout changes.
Worked with an engineer to develop a tool to quickly iterate through these layout prefabs and populate and rotate them for a larger variety in the world that doesn't look duplicated. We did this in editor instead of runtime to reduce load times. Since some other gameplay tiles get procedurally placed at runtime,
the foliage is on a separate game object that is turned off for those tiles so there is no overlap.
Because of the limitations of the prefab cloning system in Unity, we needed to be able to clear and re-generate the foliage when there were updates to the prefabs. This allowed us to iterate on the shaders/materials, layouts, and any necessary physics.
Documented the usage of the tool so that level designers could generate and re-populate these when the world layout changes.
|
|
