Development Time: 14 weeks at 50%
Engine: ROSE (Our own engine)
Editor: Unreal Editor
Genre: Survival Horror
Target Platform: PC

For our seventh game project we looked at games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil for inspiration and as reference for what we wanted to make. The result was an atmospheric survival horror game with an artstyle reminiscent of PlayStation 2 games.

Aside from working on game features I made a lot of the sound design for this project (Together with my colleague Adrian Casagrande) as well as shaping the narrative of the game.

DECALS

For our artists to be able to break up the visual repetetiveness of long corridors and make the setting of the game more grungey we decided that our engine needed the added feature of projected decals.

Since our main rendering pipeline is deferred, the implementation of deferred decals that could read information from the gbuffer was relatively simple, but there were a few things that I wanted to fix.

A problem that stood out to me was that when the direction of the decal projection got too close to being parallel with the surface it projected on it would create this ugly smear effect that is a result of the parallel surface using the same texture coordinates.

There are surely more elegant ways to fix this problem but the way I solved it was to take the dot product of the pixels world normal and the decals projection direction, and discard that pixel if the value was too close to 1.

RENDERING LAYERS

Another problem with the decals however was that they could affect dynamic objects like the player or enemies if they were to walk into the projection area, which wasn’t ideal.

To fix this I added the option for objects to define what rendering layer they belong to. By setting an unsigned integer through bitmasking I could decide that the players mesh should have a certain value, and by writing this value to another gbuffer texture the decals can then sample this gbuffer texture and discard pixels based on the bitmask value.

The rendering layer bitmask enum.

A capture of what the gbuffer texture could look like. In this case the character is part of both the Player-layer and the NotAffectedByDecals-layer and therefore all pixels of the mesh have been saved to the texture with a value of 20 in the red channel (In reality the whole texture is red, but since the colors can’t be visualized past a value of 1 they have been normalized, hence why only the player character is visible here).

This is how the decal shader utilizes the RenderLayer gbuffer texture to discard pixels that are part of the NotAffectedByDecals-layer.

Lights can also use this rendering layer to control what layers they want to cast light onto or if shadows should not be cast for certain layers. I added this because our player character has a chest-mounted flashlight and this was a problem since the character’s arms often comes in the way of the lightbeam, so while it may not be very realistic I made the flashlight ignore the player mesh for gameplay reasons.

INTERACTABLES & HUD

The gameworld had to contain various interactable objects such as item pickups, locked doors, and puzzle-related objects, so to have them all behave in the same way I created a base-interactable that all interactables could inherit from.

All interactables detect when the player is nearby and looking towards it, and displays a widget to indicate that its something of interest. They also all have the optional functionality of calling custom scripts or moving the camera to a specified point when interacted with.

I also made the players inventory and an accompanying HUD that would dynamically show the player certain elements when relevant (eg. health item count pops up when healing).

WHAT I LEARNED

• How to use bitmasking for filtering.
• Creating decals and calculating decal projection.