At the end of my first year on Breda University of Applied Sciences, I have worked on "Uncle Lovecraft's Fun Time Murder Hole" for six weeks. This was my first team project that I had to deal with remote working thanks to Covid-19.
This game is about a cultist that needs to feed the beast with alive people. To do this, you need to throw people inside a big pit. Dead people don't count, so make sure you don't kill them and feed them alive to the beast.
I was the gameplay programmer, and most of my features were sadly scrapped for the final game. Think about features like picking up boxes, but also a few particle effects as well. The game did change directions multiple times. What did end up in the game was my optimization to cull objects in the game, I made sure that the tentacles will be grown from the ground and I made a nice occlusion culling shader that will make sure that you can still see the player if he/she/it is behind a house.
To get this effect working properly, I needed to be more creative. I first made a masking effect that had no transparency. After feedback from the artists, I made it transparent. This causes glitchy effects in Unreal Engine thanks to the deferred rendering system. Transparency is done in a different way. To solve this problem, I applied dithering to my shader. Dithering will make holes in your texture. These holes can only be 1 or 0. So, colour, or no colour. The anti-aliasing will smooth out these holes, which will make the shaders look transparent. This fake transparency is also a more optimized way of having transparent looking objects.
