Development Time: 4 + 10 weeks at 50%
Engine: ROSE (Our own engine)
Editor: Unreal Editor
Genre: ARPG
Target Platform: PC

Since Spite was made in our own engine, the production spanned two different projects; The first was mainly for building functionality to import level data from the Unreal Editor and to render a scene in our custom engine without any actual gameplay. The second project was the game itself.

MATERIAL EDITOR

In this project I worked closely with our technical artists to create a pipeline that would let them create and put visual effects into the game without relying as much on us programmers to implement them.

I made a material editor that would let users create material-files that were readable by our game engine, containing the textures and shaders that would be used.

With this tool I wanted to give our artists something that would be easy to use, while simultaneously letting our technical artists control the more advanced parts like shaders and pipeline states.
The tool can handle dragging and dropping of textures, meshes, shaders, and materials, as well as letting the user adjust properties like transparency, back face culling, and color tinting.

Shaders in the videos are created by Malte Ekvall & Alexander Thambert!

LEVEL TEXTURE BLENDING

Since our artists had expressed big interest in being able to vertex paint the levels to blend between textures I took on the task. While I couldn’t fulfill their wish to use vertex painting we did however come up with a solution together that would achieve the effect they were looking for.

By placing a plane that covered the level they could vertex paint on that from a topdown view in Unreal Engine and then export it, that I would in turn use to blend between different materials on the ground tiles.

NAVIGATION MESH & PLAYER MOVEMENT

For this game I did a lot of work on the player movement, implementing functionality for navigation meshes and the agents that move on it.

I also aided in creating the boss & enemy AI, as well as some of the players abilities (One of which you can see demonstrated to the right).

WHAT I LEARNED

• How to handle navigation data and create AI that can utilize that data to make believable game characters.
• To work iteratively with custom tools, and the importance of taking the time to not just fix bugs but prevent them from appearing again, especially when it comes to a front end user interface (This may have happened a few times).
• Planning a sprint more properly, using time estimation to my advantage to know approximately how much work I’ll have time to do.