Hadyn Lander

We made a shiny puzzle-platformer in 48 hours for GGJ18. Very bloom. Much shader. Quite proud of this one - and super thankful for having a great team! :D Learn more / download the game (for Windows) here:  https://globalgamejam.org/2018/games/rectifier

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Shadertoy over the past few months. This cloudball is my latest experiment - and my first foray into volume raymarching. There’s an interactive version which allows you to orbit the camera around freely by clicking/dragging, if you’re into that sort of thing ;)

It grows hungry. [Tonight's update doesn't make a lot of sense. What kind of glass would ripple and distort like this!? Why was I talking about a shader like it's a living, breathing thing!? We may never know... but it was fun to play around with.]

New version of my frosty glass shader! This one forgoes depth-based blur in favor of a much wider, and considerably more efficient stochastic sampling method, inspired by this very helpful “Monte Carlo” blur shader. I’m currently using Playdead Games’ temporal AA solution to smooth out the sampling across multiple frames. It’s awesome! I finally understand why devs are so keen on TXAA these days... I also added support for emissive colours/textures in HDR, so that parts of the glass can light up and feed into the camera bloom effect - because, hey, why not?

I’ve been meaning to do a frosted glass shader for a while, and the nice-lookin’ glass in the new Deus Ex (pictured below) inspired me to finally get around to it! The one I’ve come up with is a little different in that the blur is depth-based, so objects that are further behind the glass are blurred more than those which are close - it’s a bit more realistic, though it comes at a noticeable cost to performance. Their blur gets a bit wider, too... I still need to do some tests to see whether I can replicate that without costing too much more in performance. I’ve implemented this with the Unity 5 standard shader, with the ‘smoothness’ value dictating clarity at different points on the surface. In all other regards it works more or less like any other transparent version of the standard shader, including the ability to colourise it, add a diffuse map, fade opacity, etc. I should probably sleep now.

If Deus Ex can be believed, 2029 is going to be a big year for Knuckles...

Fantastic beasts (and other mistakes of nature). A few of my favourite creatures from No Man’s Sky so far...

The search was long, but finding a planet like this has made it all worthwhile. No Man's Sky is such a beautiful game!

Prototyping! I ported my hover-vehicle code from UE4 to Unity5, and wanted to stress-test the performance. Turns out it’s damn good! These were taken whilst testing with one player-controlled ship and 512 AI ships. It runs surprisingly well on my rig (1080p 60fps), though the AI are very basic at this stage - they point towards the player, and accelerate. I jumped off the edge of the world into an infinite abyss, and they all followed. Some got tangled into a giant ball, which continued to track me down by consensus, with surprising proficiency. This is in Unity 5.4, making use of the pre-release Cinematic Image Effects package for some beautiful HDR rendering!

The music is one of my tracks from around five years ago. I think I like it more than most of my newer stuff... Fun fact: the track was actually the first thing I named “Skybreaker”, before I started using it as my production tag.

Over the past few weeks I’ve developed these early concepts for Knights of Entropy - my big games project for 2016! From a gameplay perspective, it's what you might call a 'souls-like' (I take inspiration from Dark Souls / The Witcher / Zelda), though with a few slightly different focuses. The concept originated from my desire to build a game in which being a spellsword is as fun as it sounds. Imo, most games butcher this horribly - usually by making swordplay and spell-casting two wholly disparate systems with little to no crossover. I aim to address that directly, though I won’t reveal how just yet...

Groose says it best! I just stumbled across a few of the screenshots I took during an emulator playthrough of Skyward Sword I did a year and a half back. The game has some beautiful effects, and aside from a few blurry textures it looks great in HD! I seem to have lost most of the pics I took earlier in the game, but I thought I’d share a few of my favourite ones from what remains. Dolphin Emulator is brilliant! Aside from a few audio sync issues and minor problems with the bloom effect scaling it emulated everything very well (and for all I know they may have fixed some of those issues since I played). And in case anyone’s wondering - don’t worry, I own it all on wii / am not a filthy pirate.

Playing around with displacement as a test for what might one day be a water shader. I particularly like the third line from the bottom, which launches a little blob into the air and then catches it...

Someone asked about my process, and I thought I’d be nice and share.

Instead of sleeping... The effect now works with fully dynamic lights/shadows! The first picture is what it’s supposed to look like; the others are screenshots of earlier work-in-progress, and some of the weirder/prettier glitches I managed to create! I’ll try to share a video (or gif) of it in motion tomorrow.

The mad experiments continue! The earlier version of this demo only worked with a single directional light (i.e. the sun). This version works with an unlimited number of static lights. It's not especially ideal because the positions of lights and shadows can't change during runtime - i.e. if I move one of the "trees"/black post thingies, its shadow will stay where it was. Still, this works well as a proof of concept; it's given me confidence that it'll be worth the effort to research how to make this work with fully-dynamic lighting over the coming days/weeks/whatever!