Stray Gods: Orpheus

Tech artist/VFX artist

DLC for the award winning game Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, I was lucky enough to get to work on this project from the start. There were lots of opportunities to further develop and enhance processes we had developed during the making of the base game in order to make this the best DLC possible for fans.

 

An expansion of the base game that came with it’s own unique challenges and opportunities, developed with an absolutely delightful team at Summerfall Studios.

 
 

Being involved from the very start of this DLC project, my contributions to the project included the following:

  • Helped develop tech art tools and processes to deliver the project’s creative vision in both a performant and timely fashion

  • Conducted assessment on base game processes such as lighting and rendering to ensure lessons were learned so as to require a minimal amount of optimisation and bug fixing before project delivery

  • Creation of materials, tools and particle effects to enhance environments and story beats

  • Writing of documentation related to tech art and visual effects for team reference during implementation and trouble shooting

  • Developed processes that allowed the game to use elements like larger crowds that would not have been possible without extensive manual time and effort

 
 

Software used

 

  • Unreal Engine 4

  • Blender

  • Procreate

 

Project examples

(Potential story spoilers below!!)

Concert crowds

In the base game, all crowd/background characters were 2D sprites with stylized rim lighting painted in. To have the number of people present that we wanted in Orpheus’ concert, various approaches to using 2D crowd sprites were explored but were found to be too limiting in terms of both performance and the restrictions they would create for shot placement and camera movement. To address this, a 3D crowd was created with a basic, controllable dance loop using material World Position Offset to save on the overhead of many Skeletal Meshes, and with a material that replicated the rim lighting approach our other 2D crowd sprites use for stylistic consistency across the game.

“Money rain” particle effect

Unique particle effects were needed throughout the game, including this “money rain” particle system to show one character’s main personality trait. Regular particle motion control from Niagara was combined with some custom World Position Offset in the particle’s material to have the notes fall from the sky but feel less flat and 2D than the particles actually are, by making the planes twist and curve slightly as they spiral down.

City crowds

For the more sparsely populated city street scenes (compared to the concert), we decided to stick with the 2D sprite approach for crowds, but because background crowds needed to be able to be scattered around in various places, we needed a way to try to ensure the poses in the sprites made sense relative to their environment. Because of the layout of the streets, if sprites were drawn walking in profile and were billboarded to face the camera, there could be several shots where a crowd sprite may appear to be walking into a random wall etc. To solve this, a tool was created that allowed placing the crowds along the streets, and then when a camera cut occurred an event would be called that told each crowd sprite where the camera was positioned relative to the sprite, and the sprite material would choose from an array of textures to use the most relevant direction illustration. This way, crowds always appear to be walking along the footpaths without constant swapping or keyframing being required from cinematic editors.

Karaoke screen

To make the environments feel more alive and dynamic, materials were made for several looping background elements, such as this karaoke screen. A simple mask texture was created that a material then used to gradually swap colours along, row by row, to give the impression of karaoke text being shown to a user. A basic, scrolling horizontal line effect also helps give the impression of a slightly CRT screen. The implication of text is a common solution in environments, particularly in background elements that should not be the main focus, to both not be distracting to players but also to avoid localization issues

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Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical