Spite: Catharsis
Play as a troubled monk on a deep astral journey within. Wielding the skills of your warrior past, face your inner demons, conquer your emotions, and confront your past self in a final battle for inner peace.
My fifth and sixth project in a group with level designers, animators, game artists and other programmers. The first game made in our own game engine, Feather engine
Things I worked on during this project.
Vertex painting
Screen picking
The directional light
Vertex Painting
During this project, I implemented vertex painting, as per request from out artists and level designers. The pipeline was set up so that the painting itself was done in unreal, and then the designers exported the mesh, with the painted vertices, to our engine. The materials chosen for each color was also decided by the level designers, and was exported from unreal together with the level.
The actual implementation I worked on was mostly in the default pixel shader, where I lerped between the materials, based on the color of the vertex. I also had to change our meshes, so that they could hold a maximum of four materials.
It ended up only getting used on the ground, as it was the only mesh big enough to make it worth painting. If I had known this when I implemented it, I probably would have done a separate shader for just the ground.
Vertex painting in action
Screen picking
One of the requirements for this project was that the player would walk to where the mouse was clicked. The way I implemented this was by getting the pixel position on the screen the mouse was on and convert it to the relative position in the game world, in 3D coordinates.
The way I converted screen coordinates to world position was by moving the coordinates I had into NDC, and then divided the X coordinate with the top left element of the projection matrix and the Y coordinate with element (2, 2) of the projection matrix. I then proceeded by adding a z element to my vector, which was 1 (since I needed the ray to point forward). What was left was to multiply the new vector with the matrix of the camera we picked from.
I could then shoot a ray from the camera’s position in the calculated direction, and when the ray intersected with the ground, I got the coordinates that the player was going to.
The reason why I looped through the objects from back to front was because they were sorted from distance to the camera, for rendering purposes. Looping this way meant that if the ray collided with something, it would generally take fewer iterations than if I looped it the other way around.
I wanted to give the artists as much control as possible to control the light in the game. I figured that the fastest way for them to iterate was to have settings in the game which wuold update in real time as they changed them, so I made a ImGui window with different options for them to change.
