A Familiar Tale

Instanced Rendering

As the game would be set in a forest we wanted to create a feeling of being outdoors. In order to do this we believed that authentic looking foliage would be very important. When trying to load a level with foliage from Unreal Engine it caused performance issues for Metronome. Trying to solve this, we lowered the amount of foliage in the level. This only partly solved the problem since it damaged the aesthetic. We realised that the best way to optimise this were implementing instanced rendering.

Model viewer

In earlier projects together, my team and I had a lot of problems with verifying our objects and generating our material files. This caused much time to be wasted for everyone in the team. Therefore, in the beginning of this project we wanted to make this pipeline easier and faster. The goal was to be able to drop a .fbx file into a program along with the belonging material files. This would then output a custom mesh file as well as a material file into the correct path. This task was the first I finished and when I was done implementing it I also made it possible to preview animations and shaders in the model viewer. The model viewer helped a lot during this and future projects.

Engine

To add variation to our environment we wanted to use deferred decals and I implemented this with the help of Filip Tynell. It made it possible to put scratch marks on trees and footprints on the ground.

As the games setting was outdoors, we needed to make a walkable surface that was not stale and repetitive. For this reason, we decided to use Unreal Engine's terrain tool to make the walkable surface. We then exported an image that me and Aron Jönsson used to generate a height field. To render the terrain we spilt the mesh into small pieces and used our culling to only render the pieces in frame.

Gameplay

To facilitate the game development process we wanted our Level Designers to be able to place different gameplay elements in the world and test with as fast as possible without the help of a programmer. We implemented prefabs that they could place in the world and try out by reloading the game. I gave them the opportunity the place different things such as triggers for showing a text dialogue or picking up collectables.