Project: The Wagadu Chronicles – Twin Drums
Role: Technical Artist – Art Manager
January 2020 – July 2023
The Wagadu Chronicles was an Afrofantasy MMORPG developed by PixelPie Games.
As Tech Artist I worked on art asset pipelines, Unity and Blender tools for artists and designers, runtime systems and custom shaders.
In the second half of my time at Twin Drums I was also managing our small team of artists.
Scroll down for an overview of some of the projects and tasks I have worked on.
Procedural Level Editor: Suwan
The world of Wagadu is made up of tens of islands that appear once in the game and then disappear when a new cycle (in the game’s lore) begins, living space for new islands.
Suwan is a set of procedural tools I have developed together with our level designer Jennika Cederholm to help us produce the many islands required for the game.
Here’s a bullet list of the features I’ve developed for Suwan:
– Map generation and editing
– Unity Terrain generation and painting
– Ocean and Lakes generation, with SDF-driven shores detection
– Cliffs and ramps generation to connect different terrain elevations
– Biomes and sub-biomes vegetation scattering
– Gameplay resources scattering
– NPC encounters scattering
– Minimap generation
You can find further technical details on this blog post I wrote a while ago, or you can watch me demonstrate Suwan’s feature set in the video below.
Day Night Cycle
I developed a day night cycle that supported our stylized art style and the needs of game design for features available at different times of day.
To achieve the desired stylized look I exposed lots of intuitive parameters that could be live-tweaked to nail the different times of day. Here’s some of them:
– duration in minutes of a 24-hours Wagadian day
– daytime vs nighttime speed curve
– light color gradient and light intensity curve
– ambient light type and gradients
– fog color gradient and density curve
– post-process override curves for specific effects (like Bloom)
There’s post on my blog with further details and a timelapse of a full cycle.
In the video below you can see how the day night cycle was integrated into the rest of the game by exposing global parameters that other systems could use.
Environment Uber Shader
This is an HLSL ubershader I wrote to shade all the vegetation, buildings and props in the game. The shader implements our custom stylized lighting and a set of optional features that artists can use to ground the assets in the world of Wagadu.
Here’s the list of implemented features. You can also watch the video below where I walk through all the features and demonstrate them on some of the assets from the game.
Day Night Cycle-driven emissive light
This is a classic emission feature but driven by the current time of day. There is a global animation curve controlling the intensity of all emissions throughout the day.
Vegetation Wind
When this feature is on, trees and bushes react to a global wind simulation. The features expose parameters to control the response to the wind but also reads vertex data information that artists paint on the assets for finer control.
Coverage
This feature is used for effects on top the asset surface, like moss growing on trees and rocks, or sand or snow depositing on flat upward-facing surfaces.
Multicolor
This feature lets artists layer additional details on top of existing assets. The details are driven by hand-painted multi-channel masks that the shader samples to know what colors to apply to each pixel. The multi-channel masks supports 4 channel and gives artists the ability to layer 4 additional colored details on existing assets.
This feature was one of the most fun and important to implement as it enabled us reuse assets without blowing our small budget.
Random Color
This feature samples a world space noise texture and applies one of 3 specified colors to the asset surface. The noise sampled at the object pivot to ensure that the random sampled value is uniform across the asset surface. This feature was extremely helpful to create the illusion of assets variations on our islands.
Terrain Blending
This feature helps blend vegetation and small objects — mainly rocks — with the terrain below, making the assets look more grounded in the scene.
Character Creator
This is by far the most complex pipeline for the whole game, not only from a technical point of view, but also because it involved the collaboration of almost every artist and programmer in the team.
I was responsible for the asset pipeline, ensuring that we could have solutions that would allow a small team to produce a seemingly infinite variation of characters and clothing. These solutions also extended to the in-game characters implementation as the game would have to potentially render lots of them at the same time.
I can’t summarize the whole pipeline here but I have written a post about it. The post has details on rigs and animations workflows, Blender and Unity tools and a video on the in-game character creator, so go check it out here.