Highlights
Indirect Lighting & Physical Based Rendering
The game was built using Vulkan as the rendering API, which was primarily managed by my
colleague Marcus, while I focused on the implementation layer. For this project, I looked to
achieve real time indirect lighting using a technique known as voxelization alongside a
physical based rendering system. However, I faced difficulties optimizing the algorithm
while maintaining frames and thus, with the lack of time, the indirect component was
scrapped from the final game and instead the voxels were used to generate less than ideal
shadows.
I consider the final visuals of the game a huge failure on my end but it was an extremely insightful lesson which resulted in countless days examining RenderDoc captures and looking at possible areas of optimizations.
I consider the final visuals of the game a huge failure on my end but it was an extremely insightful lesson which resulted in countless days examining RenderDoc captures and looking at possible areas of optimizations.
Win32 Custom Editor
Using Win32 to build the editor from the ground up was an extremely laborious task and the
experience taught me the importance of coding patterns as a means of writing highly modular,
expandable, and maintainable code. From manually recreating Android’s RecyclerView to handle
infinitely large number of objects in a hierarchy, to many unsuccessful attempts at building
dockable windows, to building a node graph editor for the material rendering system, I had a
great experience building an important tool and constantly communicating with the team’s
designers to get feedback on the editor’s usability.
Unfortunately for the first semester of the project, the editor was built and maintained solely by myself alongside with my other roles in the project. Because of the huge amount of work required to maintain the editor and it’s eventual slow down when handling huge scenes, a decision was made to migrate the editor to Dear ImGui so that more members on the team could help maintain the editor and I could focus on the rendering pipeline.
Unfortunately for the first semester of the project, the editor was built and maintained solely by myself alongside with my other roles in the project. Because of the huge amount of work required to maintain the editor and it’s eventual slow down when handling huge scenes, a decision was made to migrate the editor to Dear ImGui so that more members on the team could help maintain the editor and I could focus on the rendering pipeline.
Original Soundtrack
The game’s soundtrack was composed from scratch and made dynamic - each track has unique
transitions and
changes according to in-game events. In addition to over 200 lines of in-game dialogue I had
to record, I
got the chance to produce a soundtrack spanning multiple genres, featuring live vocals and
also live
instruments.
The full soundtrack is freely available below and more details on each track will be on a future blog post!
The full soundtrack is freely available below and more details on each track will be on a future blog post!