Altiia and the Trial Islands
This was the third and final game project of Futuregames. I got to do a variety of gameplay centric effects and made water that was interactable. I worked solutions for lighting the whole world and also made sure it ran properly. Our objective was to make a sandbox game with customizability.
Duration: 7 weeks
Engine: Unity
Role: VFX, shaders, tech art & lighting
Water
The Trial Islands are surrounded by a vast sea, thus a water shader was needed. Starting out being just for show but we noticed very quickly that players wanted to enter the water to take a swim. This meant that a lot of potential issues had to be considered when implementing it. The transparency is faked by grabbing the scene color and overlaying it.
For the reflections I used Unity’s own reflection script which creates a camera below the water plane, mirroring the player camera. The output is written to a render target texture which is overlaid on the water surface. Having double cameras means double draw calls for reflected objects. By using instancing as much as possible and by limiting which objects to be reflected we could maintain a solid framerate. The sea floor caustics is a panning emissive texture on the terrain mesh which is distorted by the water. If a pixel is above sea level then caustic’s intensity is set to zero.
Having splashes didn’t occur to us at first but made it so much more satisfying to enter the water and have a good time splashing around.
Gameplay effects
Timing effects with animations through game logic was not something I had a lot of experience with. It was good practice and especially fun with the awesome animations of Nils Söderman in our group.
The flowers represent color pickups which allow for customization of the player’s outfit. I image it’s colored pollen and spores coating the character.