Slumberland
Slumberland, made in ghastlight in sprint 2024.
Slumberland is a third person platformer with a cozy feel and loveable characters.
For this project my main focus was on reworking and expanding our postprocessing stack to improve the visual fidelity of the game, in addition to giving our artist the tools they need to craft a mood using color and lighting.
I worked throughout the project to explore differing variations of creating a bloom shader.
And then collaborated with our programmers to optimize the effect and keep it within frame budgets.
Originally I used a version of a gaussian blur to create a bloom texture which I used a "pow"
operator on and then added to the orriginal image, something that looked good on a small scale but
became really expensive when pushing the size of the bloom.
Eventually I settled on using downsampled versions of the game render to create the effect and after
changing the way I sampled the textures and implementing decreasing wheighting on lower resolutions
I overcame the blocky look of the early itterations.
A main aspect of the post processing for the game was the fog. It became clear early on that we needed a
well thought out fog system for both visual and performance reasons.
The base idea for the effect is a simple distance fog. By using the zDepth of the rendered
image to lerp between the final render and a solid color a simple fog effect is created. This
fog system takes that effect and replaces the solid color with a pre-rendered pass of just the
skybox.
To take the fog even further I again use the zDepth to blend between another color. This time
I multiply the zDepth to create a closer mask and then mask it again using a cloud texture
from the skybox render pass.
This results in an effect where distant objects fade into the skybox and objects just
far off the midground will fall between the clouds and the skybox.
And finally I want to give proper credit to the amazing team I had the opportunity to work with on this project.