Technical Artist

- Work with the leads to achieve a harmony between scripting and art.

- Camera Logic

- GUI Implementation

- Generate and maintain shaders

- General Scripting

 

Assistant Manager

- Assist the Production Manager with scheduling, triage, and critical path

 

Narrative Coordinator

- Work with the narrative team to define a story from the source material

- Work with illustrators and animators to create a pipeline for preparing the cutscenes

- Implement the cutscenes

Camera Movement

For the basic prototype, the only functions the camera needed was to follow the player and offset along the Z-axis.  However,  to help lead the player along and augment a nice flow and pace, the camera needed more functions that could be called at specific times.

 

Triggers were created with preset options that allowed the camera to zoom in and out or offset in different directions.  This worked for a while, but soon became apparent that it was too restricting for the level designers to work around.  Other issues came up during playtesting sessions where the players felt the camera was swinging around too wildly.

 

The solution was to tweak how the triggers operated.  Opening up the triggers to the level designers meant that they had more parameters to work with, the biggest caveat being able to reset the camera's speed.  By interpolating between not only the destinations to move the camera, but also interpolating the speeds at which it moved created a much more seamless transition.

 

Interpolating Textures

One of the early issues was how to swap from one texture to another.  Initially, four separate materials were created and each object checked which color is the current world and would switch to it.  However, if one tree has four textures and four materials, then ten trees would have forty textures and forty materials.

 

The solution was to create a shader that would grab all four textures and interpolate between them for a more elegant and efficient pipeline.  By setting up a current and target texture and interpolating between them, the result is a fading effect that is aesthetically more pleasing and less jarring than the snapping of simply swapping the materials.

 

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These are only two of the most prominent issues we ran into during the production of Prisma, and even they had smaller issues and pieces to be sorted.  For a more in-depth view of the various issues we encountered and how I resolved them, please take a look at my blog.