Website: http://www.godhoodgame.com/

During my second internship at Abbey Games I participated in the creation of a religious god-game: Godhood.

Responsibilities

My main responsibility was to provide visual feedback for in-game moments and working tightly together with both artists and animators to generate a lot of visual fidelity in the game. As the game runs within a simulation, one of the key elements of that was improving the atmosphere and giving it a lot of variation. Giving you both a place in the world of Godhood and improving the general shareability of the game.

Furthermore this was the first time I was in a project that tightly worked together with the community with alpha/beta testing to do fast iterations on the game and get the best possible results.

Key features

• Anti-aliasing in 2D, using SMAA (Sub-pixel Morphological Anti-aliasing, by Crytek)
  • This was necessary as we’re alpha-testing quite a bit
  • This also included research in many different screen-space anti-aliasing techniques
• A map border
  • A cliff-side that gives you a place in the world, instead of being a hard cut-off
  • A terrain rendered in 3D, mapped onto our 2D plane
  • A backdrop giving you the feeling you’re high up, including clouds that interact with the weather
• A weather system
  • Giving many weather options through raininess, fogginess, heat and fog height
  • Many different presets that could be interpolated
  • Extremes like thunderstorms, heat waves and thick fog
  • Very fake “atmospheric scattering”
  • Depth of field/tilt shift
• Many particles and animations
  • Mainly in the battle sections of the game
• “Endorphin” UIs, as we call them
  • Rewarding, intensively animated user-interfaces for key moments in the game
• Packing all of the above into a neat experience
• General improvements of feedback in the game through visual cues
• A particle editor
  • Particles were already in place, but weren’t very user-friendly to customize and create
  • Code editor with syntax highlighting, word matching and keyword highlighting
  • Curve editor with hermite curves
  • Heavily based on PopcornFX
  • Made in Qt

Links

Godhood’s Kickstarter Campaign (backed for €54,376!)
Abbey Games’ YouTube channel (with quite some Godhood content)
Godhood’s Steam Page