Hidden Heroes - Tech Art
This game was made as a final group project over the span of 3 months for Howest DAE.
Hidden Heroes is a narrative game based on a real story. You'll run the local bakery of a Belgian village during the German occupation of World War II. Play the demo here: https://vikkever.itch.io/hidden-heroes
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Credits:
-I handled all technical art contraptions shown in this post. I also did a lot of environment and 3D art found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4N0eL1
-All Characters and UI, as well as the textures of the floors, walls and paintings were done by: https://www.artstation.com/helyayas
-All 3D Assets not shown in the asset showcase, as well as all VFX, were made by Kasper Van De Velde.
-Game mechanics, code, and basically all the rest by our programmers: Steven van den Hoven, Kasper Van De Velde,
Samirs Vertahovs and Viktor Cloes
-Our in-house writer and narrative designer: René Mets
-Composer and musical genius: Jenny Diana Pillet
-Thanks to Nazareth-De Pinte to trust us with this project, based on their exhibition "Het Vergeten Verzet"
https://www.nazarethdepinte.be/vrije-tijd/cultuur-en-erfgoed/tentoonstellingen
This post breaks down all technical aspects of Hidden Heroes. For all environment art, go to: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4N0eL1
The above shows the background shader. We wanted something more interesting than just a solid black color.
The Floor Transition Shader is part of every opaque basic material shader with alpha clipping enabled. At its core, it just thresholds the distance to the center.
A cheap transition screen was needed for between days and levels. This solution uses only a single texture map and simple shader.
The UI menus were adapted from the transition screen shader.
The core of the Light System is lerping between variables from "TimeOfDay" ScriptableObjects!
All steps of creating the environment and assets were deliberate choices. The final game runs in the browser of low-end laptops, so performance was very important. As well as managing scope as the main and only "full-time" 3D artist.
This project needed a very efficient workflow while keeping up quality. Certain shortcuts were taken, such as auto-UVs and procedural texturing, to keep the workflow flexible and fast.
The asset shader uses Keywords to enable and disable functionality. Only some assets "jitter", for example. Even though this increases shader variants, it keeps the shader computation costs lower in general.
Trailer