Mall Cop (Unity)
(University project, September 2022 - December 2022)
The trailer for “Mall Cop”, a manic multiplayer stealth game my team made at university.
Description
In the first semester of my masters course at Abertay University I worked with a multidisciplinary team to produce a vertical slice we called “Mall Cop” - a manic, comical multiplayer stealth game where one player plays as a thief trying to steal items from a mall and escape, while another player plays as the mall cop who is trying to stop the thief before they escape.
I was one of three programmers on this project, primarily contributing graphics and VFX work as well as some gameplay programming and production work.
Project Components
Cel Shading Character Shader:
Given the manic, comical tone we were going for as a team, we decided to go with a stylised approach to the game’s visuals. One graphical technique I proposed was cel shading, a comic book-style shading technique utilised by games like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
On the project I created a shader used on the character meshes which utilises a method of cel shading similar to Wind Waker, as well as a custom specular lighting effect meant to emulate rim lighting.
The custom shader applied to the character meshes used in-game, utilising Wind Waker-style cel shading and a subtle rim light-esque specular effect.
VFX Work:
As well as the character shaders, I created some visual effects in response to test feedback myself and the team got from our alpha build. I created a sparkle effect to help items that players can pick up stand out in the dark (based on a similar effect used in Breath of the Wild),.
Items in the dark mall standing out to the player thanks to a sparkly particle effect.
As well as this, I created a custom visual effect applied to the mall exits after the thief successfully steals all the items they need from the mall, to signpost when and where they can escape the mall to win the game. This effect takes a custom stripe shader and uses triplanar mapping to create a striking scrolling stripe effect, as well as the sparkle particle effect mentioned above, to make the exits stand out in the dark mall.
Stripey visual effect using triplanar mapping to highlight the mall exits to the thief.
Production Contributions:
Part-way through the project I improved the production habits of the team by proposing changes to the Trello board we used to track tasks, making the team more aware of who was working on what task throughout the project, and implementing meeting agendas and minutes into our workflow, keeping the team focussed on moving discussions forward during meetings and recording decisions made for archiving and keeping teammates who couldn’t make it to the meeting up-to-date on what was going on.