Gameplay Video:
Role: Technical Artist, Environment Artist
Platform: PC
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Screenshots:
Technical Art behind <A Way Out>
Comic Shader - Used in a way its not ... supposed to be
We first convened at a local K-BBQ restaurant for brainstorming after a long Friday school day, and coincidentially, although @Paul, @Henry and @Devis had never met before, they all loved reading comics especially black-n-white ones.
Because the topic was "make me laugh", we wanted to make the game so gamers truly laugh after they played, no matter how short the game is. We aimed for 2 minute gameplay, and @Henry bursted us into laughter with his joke on holding sh*t in while walking felt like crawling.
Fun fact about this project was that, the shader is the easiest to develop. Given the basis of cel shading, we simply added some hatching (very minor) to some areas. Took less than 2 hours to finish.
Then our genius designers brought to me this idea of excluding sh*ts from the shader and make them the color they really should be - brown and yellow, ewww. So I added a custom depth pass for differentiating sh*t with environment and characters
(Color node VS Hatch node)
Comic Bubbles - Pop ups for farting effect
Comic bubbles are the basic ways how I deal with "farting" but in a comic style.
Bubbles are handdrawn, applied as widgets
Decals - How to get things dirty
It is not over if we end at where they fart and sh*t all over the place unless we really do make them sh*t all over the place
Each sh*t projectile spawns a decal if they catch a surface, making a large stain on top of the surface
(Bug) decals dont work well with custom depth pass, but we trickily made the floor part of "sh*t" so it can be turned brown.
(What we called the "sh*t mask")
2-Day Production - Happiness and Laughter
Out of the 10 game jams I participated so far, this is the most enjoyable one. I loved every moment of it. We also really did not work too hard or pushed too far on our limit. We even had one K-BBQ that brought us this genius idea, and one Thai food that chilled us down from the excitement of developing this chaos.
Everything is written in blueprint, and it indeed saved us a lot of time for iterations
Funniest namings of assets ever. Imagine calling everything with "sh*t".
We showcased on time, in good quality, to the site and won so much laughter that made me feel the effort was worth it
(Mar 2024) I honestly still can't come to realize that my technical arts could be used in this way. It was weird, but it worked in all senses.