Intro

I’m currently working on a horror game with fellow USC students as a technical artist, which is my first time partaking in a game project under this role. The game is available for free on Steam right now!

Implementation

Magic Looking Glass

One of the game’s main mechanism is player looking through a magical looking glass that helps them see and interact with hidden objects from the ghostly world of Jinn. My first task as a technical artist is to create that enchanting feeling of the glass. I created a volume profile for the night-vision-esque effect of the ghost world and worked on a scrolling-texture effect for glass material.

Jinn’s Ghost Effect

The ghostly entity Jinn will always be in the player’s presence, but depending on whether the player looks through the looking glass, Jinn will have different visual effects. I’m working on an interactive smoke that will emit from Jinn in the normal human world. Still in working progress :)

Screen FX

Flashlight

An auto adjusting flashlight based on the screen’s luminance.

Candles

Cloth physics and shader

Distortion FX

Exorcism VFX

Footstep FX

Performance and optimization

• Figure out why the grass is so slow? (answer: Unity built-in terrain is very limited *sad)
• Reduce overdraw from smoke VFX.
• Decrease flashlight’s auto adjust mechanism from 20ms to sub 0.1ms.
• Setting up occlusion culling.

Things I learned about Perf

Resources

🔗 Scrolling caustics effects
🔗 Visual effects for smoke

🛠️ Tools used

• C#
• HLSL
• Unity