Spite Reckoning Of Hunger
TGA Project
Try the game over at Itch! – https://98ahni.itch.io/spite-reckoning-of-hunger
- Hungry Ghost Explode on Death and Auto Atack
Spite was the first Project I was a part of at TGA, We were given a reference game which was a “Diablo 3” and a choice between two themes, We went with the Tibetian theme.
Where our character is a Warrior Monk that is battling against the “Hungry Ghosts” which represents greed in Buddhism, Their hunger cant be satisfied and they only eat more and more.
This had us go in the direction of Diablo’s “Grotesque” from the first act, which explodes on death. As well as Leoric as our main reference for the boss fight with his Summoning abilities.
My main task for this project was creating the VFX for the enemies and Boss, as well as some of the environmental particles and effects!
The TGA projects were made with the custom engine made by our programmers, this meant using HLSL to create all the VFX. This project became a lot of familiarising myself with VFX, HLSL, and Perforce. As well as figuring out my place as a Technical Artist in our project group!
I learned a lot about the process of game development from start to finish as my previous experience hasn’t been from the pre-production – the final version.
- Imp VFX Atack
- Hungry Ghost Vomit Effect
We had quite a bit of communication errors during this project, most of them were caused by the disciplines assuming the others knew things they didn’t.
for example, my assumption was that the programmers knew how a VFX was built and implemented into the game and the programmer’s assumption we knew how the shader would be implemented into the engine.
which caused us as VFX artists to get tools late, such as a method of timing VFX to animation was implemented the day before the deadline. which can be seen that the timing is a bit off.
Now I understand the value of clarity and oversimplifying my communication so that if the other disciplines have no knowledge of the subject they will understand what I need, which often can be the case.
this has also made me a lot less afraid to ask when I struggle to understand.
I learned the value of cutting, there are always unknown problems that will occur during the project, Many of the effects during pre-production and in the conceptual phase where a lot bigger and grander then they are now!
I concepted every effect to reflect the peak of my ability at the time, however, my skills drastically changed day by day during this project
and the time limit did not allow me to put that amount of effort into every effect, combined with the fact that I had no prior knowledge of HLSL and how to implement VFX into actual gameplay.
- Boss Spawning VFX
- Checkpoint Activate VFX
To conclude, this project taught me a lot, the result may not be my best work, however, the knowledge acquired has been extremely valuable and I know that future projects will become easier for it, and I am happy with the effects I made considering where I was with my shader and VFX knowledge.
