Hyper Rush
Technical Artist, Programmer
Developer: Mighty Kingdom
Publisher: TBA
Platforms: TBA
Release: TBA
An asynchronous multiplayer time trial racing game from Mighty Kingdom, where players can race on a series of tracks with different abilities and power ups to set the best times possible.
Hyper Rush went through many iterations during the time I was on the project, and was an incredible learning experience. I gained exposure to working with large, multi-discipline teams, multiplayer gameplay (synchronous and asynchronous) and experimenting with different visual styles.
I worked on Hyper Rush initially as a programmer and then as a tech artist over the course of approximately 18 months. In that time, my roles allowed me to:
Create VFX through shaders and particle systems around player movement, power ups and world elements, as well as UI based effects
Assist in the exploration and development of visual style through shaders, lighting and post-processing effects
Help develop in-engine art pipelines to assist artist workflows
Work as part of a team of programmers to write code related to player movement, mechanics such as respawning and power ups, and implement visual and sound effects
Write unit tests and integration tests to help catch and prevent bugs
Document workflows and processes around VFX and pipelines
Help facilitate communication between different disciplines such as art and tech to assist in the implementation of gameplay assets
General programming and bugfixing tasks
Software used
Unity
JetBrains Rider
Git
Amplify Shader Editor
Adobe Photoshop
Project examples
Please note: Work shown below is from various points of prototyping during 2021/22, when art styles and game mechanics were still being explored and tested. As such, art style, assets and game mechanics may not be representative of the final game if it is released in future. All examples are shared with permission of Mighty Kingdom.
Toon outline exploration
After concepts from some very talented artists, I was part of a team of tech artists and 3D artists who explored a “toon” based visual style. In particular, I was involved in exploring and prototyping various approaches to including a cartoon/anime line style in the game in both a visually clear and performant way.
Different approaches were used for the player ball/mech and background elements, so the prominence of outlines could be adjusted separately. We wanted players’ attention to be drawn to important elements without distant objects having thick, distracting lines, so line density was adjustable over camera distance.
Portals
At one stage in the project there were portals the player could enter and would then be transported to a corresponding exit point on track. This portal effect prototype was created using faked depth via parallaxed UVs and some simple particle effects to imply movement that the player was transported through what was, in effect, a flat plane.
Drift mechanic
A drift mechanic was prototyped that allowed the player to enter a slide by pressing and holding a button as a way to build up a boost meter. We found we needed good visual feedback to the player that the ball was doing something different when entering the drift. Along with a combination of particle effects and a camera adjustment, a little “hop” was added when the drift began and the ball stopped spinning, to help sell the effect.
Moving the physics object itself with a small jump had various implications for gameplay, as the player had different control when on a surface or in the air, so instead the small hop motion was done via vertex position adjustment in the shader. This approach visually moves the ball and gives the appropriate feedback to the player without needing to adjust the physical collider of the ball and it’s calculated world position.
Animated UI elements
At one stage of development we had various boosts/power ups a player could collect, and it was possible to hold two of these at a time and swap which one was currently active. To both add visual interest to swapping boosts and also to help draw the players’ attention to this UI change, some extra bounce and scaling was added to these UI elements via their shader.
The gif here is zoomed in on the top left of screen, so it was important to provide feedback to the player that pressing the swap boost button did in fact have an action, and to draw their attention to which boost was now active.