SPOOKULELE

Creative Director

SPOOKULELE is an Action-Adventure game set in New Orleans. You play as two Reapers, Spooky and Haru, who use their musical abilities to fight ghosts haunting the city. I led a team of 50 students to create the project over the course of a school year.

Website

SPOOKULELE: Services

CHARACTER SHADER: LIGHTING

Authored shader in HLSL and ShaderGraph to support a mix of realistic and stylized effects for characters.

Hard-edge rim lighting with sensitivity adjusted by vertex color alpha channel.

CHARACTER SHADER: ANISOTROPIC HAIR

Authored anisotropic highlights for Haru's hair. Based on the Kajiya-Kay model, but altered slightly to better fit the stylized vision of SPOOKULELE.

PROCEDURAL ANIMATION: HEAD TURNING

Authored in-engine tools to support procedural head-turning to breathe more life into the protagonists.

I used this technology to make the protagonists dynamically face enemies the player was locked-on to during combat.

I also added dynamic bone effects on floppy parts of the characters, such as Spooky's hat and Haru's bangs. The secondary animation helped sell the natural motion.

PROCEDURAL ANIMATION: SPOOKY FACETECH

Authored in-engine tools for procedural facial animation for Spooky. His eyes are planes; the tool uses UV displacement techniques to achieve the intended effect.

GAMEPLAY DEBUG TOOL: FRAME DATA

Authored in-engine tool to assist with debugging combat gameplay. Visualizes frame data & hitboxes.

GAMEPLAY DEBUG TOOL: ENEMY SPAWNER

Authored in-engine tool to assist combat designers with creating combat scenarios. Allows a user to spawn enemies into the game during runtime and change certain game rules, such as making the player invincible or giving them unlimited mana.

VISUAL EFFECTS: SPELLCASTING

Created visual effects for various spellcast animations using a mix of particle systems, post processing effects and custom shaders. On the right is Volt Bomb, Haru's signature spell.

VISUAL EFFECTS: ENEMY DEATH

Enemy death effect utilizing the power of Unity's Visual Effect Graph.