Game 6. DirectX 9. C++. HLSL.

This is a still from final game-play video captured for the independent study for which this game was created. Please watch it in its various forms:

Quicktime 30MB (high quality)
Divx 3MB (medium quality)

This was the culminating screenshot for the game. While I set out to create a real game, complete with tools for level and content creation, there were a few technology tid-bits I wanted to focus on. These were the particle system, lighting, and the interaction of the two. In games today, particles and lighting rarely mingle, I set out to change this, All the particles in this image are grey, any coloration was caused by lighting.

Another image demonstrating some lighting effects, lit with a small amount of ambient light and a single point representing the flame from his jet-pack.

This image is merely meant to demonstrate the basic fragment shader's features. We have the ability to render multiple lights, with diffuse, bump, and specular mapping. An infinite number of lights can either be rendered in separate passes or in one pass, using available registers limiting it to 8 lights at a time.

A large part of the graphical part of this game focused on the lighting. This and the following screens were intended to give totally different looks and feels to various scenes.

Sunset lighting.

A bright day outdoors.

A screen of some actual game-play. The particle systems in these shots used a combination of actual color changing as well as lighting effects to achieve their final color.

While this game was a 2d platformer rendered in a 3d world, I was sure to take advantage of the the 3d environment. Once you achieved missile lock, missiles you fired would travel up and out, towards or away from the camera, reminding you the game is in fact 3d.

An early image of my volumetric looking particle systems. Some of the effects achieved in this render had to be removed from the final version for performance reasons, namely the specular component.

Another particle shot, showing how the lighting on the particles helps them fit into environments, especially where there is extreme lighting.