Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical
Tech artist/VFX artist
Developer: Summerfall Studios
Publisher: Humble Games
Platforms: PC, XBox One, XBox Series S|X, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch
Released: August 2023
Multi award winning game, including 2023 AGDA Game of the Year, and nominated for both a BAFTA and a Grammy. A first-of-its-kind musical video game and first release from Melbourne-based Summerfall Studios, led creatively by David Gaider, lead writer of the Dragon Age series. My first project in Unreal Engine and with a voice cast, working on this game provided a wealth of valuable experience.
A thoroughly exciting and challenging project to work on with a wonderful and talented team.
Joining Summerfall Studios in October 2022, less than a year from Stray Gods launching, my contributions to the project involved the following:
Created materials and particle effects to help emphasize narrative beats and add dynamic elements to environments, following briefs provided by the Art Director
Directly implemented VFX or guided the cinematics team in doing so where appropriate
Helped identify and resolve visual issues involving rendering and lighting
Optimization of art assets to reduce memory usage
Provided visual effects for the animated launch trailer
Create reference documentation for the team regarding tech art and VFX
Software used
Unreal Engine 4
Blender
Procreate
Project examples
(Potential story spoilers below!!)
Portals
Characters and transported between locations within the world at various times through portals summoned by the character Hermes. These portals appear where existing doors (or car boots..) previously were, and needed to be able to fade in, out, or loop during a sequence of gameplay. This effect was created with a combination of dissolving material and emissive particles.
Glowing eyes
Some characters have a glowing eye effect during the game, which was initially done by painting the eyes yellow in the sprite textures themselves. These were not emissive, however, so the glow did not feel as prominent or impactful as it could. The base sprite material was updated to allow an emissive value to be applied to areas that reached a particular threshold of yellow, meaning the effect could be applied retroactively to many sprites that had already been created by simply adding keyframes to the sequences, without the use of special masks or other updates
Lighthouse
Existing environmental elements, such as this lighthouse that appears in one of the songs, were enhanced with additional lighting and post process elements. There were several challenges in scenarios like this which use a combination of 3D environments with 2D unlit character sprites.
Dissolve effects
Magical elements like summoned character sprites and armour needed to be able to appear and dissolve over time. A combination of shader and particle effects make this possible dynamically in a way that is controllable by cinematic editors and is also more memory efficient than having multiple copies of sprites keyframed with various stages of dissolve painted in.