The Blackwood Project

My role: Technical Artist.

Responsibilities: Shaders, 3D and UI VFX, procedural creation, debugging graphical issues, profiling.

This game was made at TGA in about 9 weeks.

The game is a slow-paced horror shooter, made in our own engine, Tre Rader Kod(TRK).

About the game

You're an agent investigating a distress signal, armed with a flashlight and a revolver. 

Creep through the horror infested darkness of Blackwood Manor to uncover its secrets.

Download: https://virendrar.itch.io/the-darkwood-project

In some parts of the game there are fabrics and tarps covering up props and other things. So instead of having artists model each piece of cloth by hand, I set up a cloth simulation in Houdini and  connected it to the Unreal Engine(What we use as a level editor before exporting levels to our engine). And now the artist can place the HDA in the level, select what the simulation should interact with and set the parameters for how the cloth should behave. Then they can quickly convert it to a static mesh when they are happy with it in Unreal and export it with the level.

To make particle effects I used a particle editor made by our own programmers, this enabled me to create VFX with both sprites and meshes at the same time with different timings and much more. I could also use it with my own HLSL shaders, like a flipbook for blood splashes for example.

In the TRK engine we had a built-in UI editor where I could add my shaders for elements like the healthbar.

We also had visual scripting in the engine so I could make effects like bugs running across the floor when the box is triggered.

For some effects like the light rays from the windows I just placed a mesh and created a panning texture.