Keeper of Time
A Forray Into Shaders
Throughout Keeper of Time's development, I was tasked with utilizing Unity's ShaderGraph to create assets and effects for the game, including enabling the player to see a dithered outline of the Keeper when they were hidden behind a wall, creating a lava material for the volcano, and making disappearing platforms crack and glow with a warning red.
Through this process, I became familiar with the Shadergraph interface and learned about concepts such as Voronoi Noise, UV maps, Alpha Clip, and generally how nodes interacted with each other to create interesting effects.
I am most proud of my cracked platform shader as there were no tutorials on how to achieve the desired effect. It is a unique effect I hand-crafted myself utilizing the concepts I had learned.
A Seamless Experience
During development, I was tasked with a multitude of QOL/Polish features that helped to create a visually appealing and seamless overall playthrough experience.
Transitions are a core element in ensuring the game feels continuous, and I implemented three different transitions into the game: a death screen wipe, a portal transition, and cutscene blackouts. The portal transition is especially noteworthy, as it combined post-processing effects, coroutines, and animation curves to create a unique and seamless transition.
Smooth camera work enhances the feeling of gameplay. I worked with the Cinemachine package in order to implement a variety of camera effects. Wall jumping sections were given stability by utilizing a dolly camera linked to a trigger zone. A level preview was created by animating a camera along a path, further enhanced with transitions. Cutscenes were given varied camera angles and movement to provide a more interesting narrative experience.
Most importantly, I spearheaded the implementation of cutscenes in the game, which were vital to adding extra polish to the game and enabling the storytelling of the game. Through a combination of camera work, transitions, timeline, and YarnSpinner integration, cutscenes manipulate the scene in sync with the dialogue to immerse the player in the world and story.
