Phase

When I was creating the third-person controller, the camera was difficult to get it feeling right. I researched and took reference from other similar games such as The Last of Us, The Division and Metal Gear Solid on how smoothly their camera moves, especially with wall and mesh collisions. The character will always walk where the camera is facing so I had to make sure the character behaved correctly when player moves in all directions. The last bit was syncing the animations with the code, so we could quickly change the speeds of the character without redo-ing the animations.

I'm pretty proud of this one. It took weeks and weeks of tweaking, redoing and trying different approaches to get it working smoothly. First, the cover system uses an invisible offset "helper" to check if the cover is of correct size. Then the helper stays near the wall to determine if the player can continue moving. It also detect whether its a half wall or a full wall, so the player will be in different cover animations. Since the helper do all the dirty work for the player first, this results in a very smooth and non-jerking in-cover movement as the player follows the helper along ANY wall.

Our designer wanted a minimalistic UI for our game, so I took some reference of shooting games such as Call of Duty and The Last of Us. Everytime the player takes damage, the screen will flash red and tint red based on the player's health. The crosshair indicates when hitting an enemy and when the player dies, I also made a death effect similar to GTA's. I also had our ammo bar under the crosshair for easy readability.

Together with my 3D environmental artist, we did a lot of researching and countless experiments with Unity's lighting system as there were not many advanced examples or resources online. We kept fine-tuning every setting to remove undesired lighting artifacts and optimised our models and meshes for baking the lighting until we got the exact visuals we wanted Phase to have.

Click here for his portfolio!