Game Jam : PirateJam15

Adumbration

Adumbration is an isometric puzzle game focused on the use of light to uncover interactable objects in order to upgrade their light with different elemental shards to uncover new secrets. This game was created as a submission to PirateJam15, and the theme of the game jam was shadows and alchemy. The game's visuals are heavily inspired by Chiaroscuro oil painting with their high-contrast dynamic lighting. The core gameplay has roots in point-and-click adventure games, and mystery games.

Adumbration Gameplay

Nothing quite explains the mechanics of Adumbration as accurately as this GIF. Its core gameplay is centered around an I-Spy style search for hidden items and a mysterious elemental light to interact with the world.

Contributions

This was a small group effort with 3 people in total. Some of my contributions this game include : game design, programming, shader development with Unity shader graph and HLSL, 3D animations, 3D asset management, 3D modeling, UI/UX programming, and project management.

Light Revealing Shader

A large part of this game required transparency shaders. When a scripted component is attached to an object and that object has a transparency shader applied to it, the component adjusts its transparency and alpha clipping. The transparency and clipping values are derived from the location, position, and cone angle of the light.

I also added functionality for multiple lights to reveal the material or to choose the overlapping position of two or more specific lights to reveal entirely new materials, such as the blue material in the image.

Custom Spotlight Collision

The game needed a cone collision that could match the size and shape of a spotlight. Unity doesn't provide cone-shaped collisions or collisions that dynamically scale. So, I designed a dynamic spotlight collision that alters the vertices of the collision mesh to match the range and shape of the spotlight.

Light Revealing Shaders

In addition to a new collision shape, I needed to find a way to know if an interactable object inside the spotlight is being overshadowed by another object. To solve this, I had to design a new kind of collision detection system based on the verticies of a 3D mesh.

If the verticies of the mesh that are within the spotlight's cone collision and tries to trace a line back to the origin of the spotlight to determine if a vertex is lit up or not. Then we find the percentage of the mesh that is lit up by the spotlight to decide if the object can be interacted with or not. Each object has its own percentage threshold for interaction, as some objects are very large and lighting up the whole object would be too difficult.

Wall Shader & Light Movement

I created a shader that hides the room's walls based on the camera's viewing angle. Then I started adding in the controls for moving the light around the scene.

Light Rotation

Next, I added controls for rotating the light around in a circle and tilting the light up and down.

Light Orb Mesh

I 3D-modeled, UV-unwrapped, and textured some custom assets for the game.

Earth Element Light Shader

Each elemental shard collected in the game unlocks the ability to apply that element to your light. To show the element your light is set to, I made some animated shaders that resembled different elements. These shaders were applied to the light beam and as cookie textures for the spotlight. This created an effect similar to light reflected off of water or through glass.

All Light Elements

With the light mesh and shaders completed, I created a script that allowed me to switch materials for the light elements using a UI element as a trigger.

Curtain Soft Body Physics

Soft body mechanics were used to simulate the curtain's movement. I used a game object recorder to record animations with physics enabled to get predictable results each time the animation was played.

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