Fool's Gold

Genre: Platformer

Production time: 12 weeks, 50%

Team size: 13

Engine: TGE (TGA in-house engine)


Main Contributions

For this project I established a pipeline to turn models into pixel art to allow our animators to work with 3D characters rather than having to do 2D animations. I also built a lot of our background systems, including a collision system, a renderer that could sort our sprites, and the basis for our game objects and components. One of my prouder works was a particle system and editor that I expanded upon in future projects. In terms of gameplay I implemented our throwable weapon and also a health pickup. Some of my time was also spent fixing bugs and improving the performance of the game.


Particle System / Editor


A particle system with an accompanying editor. Designed for our level designers to create visual feedback and various ambient effects. It's fairly versitile, allowing an effect to consist of several emitters and having options for randomizing start properties and to lerp towards end properties over the particle's lifetime. It was also easy to use in engine, allowing a programmer to simply call on an effect at a position and the system would handle the rest. Our level designers could also place ambient effects in Unity (our level editor for this project) and they'd show up in the game.


3D Pixel Art


For this project we were encouraged to make a 2D game, but there were concerns about how the animators would work. I had previously read an article about the artstyle of Dead Cells, discussing their way to turn 3D models into pixel art. I brought this up as an option and a decision was made. For the technique you have a material with simple broad colors and render the 3D models at a low resolution. We considered using dynamic lights by using the same process for a normal map, but instead decided to let the artists choose the light setup when rendering the model. (Left images show my initial experiment while the right image shows the final product.)

Pickaxe


A throwable weapon and the characters main means of attack. I implemented a physically correct throw and a guide to help the player aim. It is modifiable through paramaters in an external JSON document so that our level designers could tweak it to better suit the intended experience. I also implemented a way for it to bounce off of the environment, but this mechanic was scrapped.

Health Pickup


A simple pickup that has a random chance of spawning when an enemy is defeated and then flies towards the player.