About

Leaves of Fate is a 2d platformer that takes place in a castle, where the player (Fenn) attempts to rescue the knights which have been trapped by a party of rogue wizards.

I was onboarded as a contractor to help throughout the 7-week production of the game, where I worked on graphical effects and environment art.

Graphics

The Rimlight Shader

Visual Goals

Visual goals
- Light around rim of sprite instead of all over, to approximate backlighting.
- No bandwidth to author bumpmaps for each sprite, so a workaround has to be made…
Iterations
- Simple raycast
  - Results were mostly smooth, but suffered at low grazing angles.
- Surface angle approximation
  - Initial results, based on existing implementations, were not promising.
  - Stumbled upon bilinear alpha fitting: Promising, but relied on mipmaps and produced artifacts on some assets.
  - With these changes, it was overall less computational work and likely more performant than raycasting.
- Jittered raycast
  - Best of both worlds, smooth results and acceptable performance.
  - Temporal noise to make visually smoother at lower sample counts
Methods
- Alpha sampling
- Angular jitter
- Ray offset jitter

Dust, Gloom, and Bloom

Visual goals
- Create a fog-like effect when used alongside tinting
- Apply subtle bloom and tonemapping to just the background
Optimization
- Do the above without requiring a backbuffer copy
- Combined effects to use minimal number of samples

Dustgloom shader before/after, in-editor view.

Ice and Snow

Ice

Visual goals
- Work with existing sprites to merge toon-y look with fancy graphics
- Refraction and reflection
- Chromatic dispersion
Limitations encountered
- Fully depends on screen buffer, so it has to be rendered after the rest of the scene
- Complete nightmare to get scenes organized in a way where this could happen

Ice shader before/after, in-game view.

Snow

Learning godot particles
Using local-space to allow parallax without an additional CanvasLayer
Custom shader to apply background tint alongside light to match room temperature

Leaves of Fate