Spite Plague Purge

Spite - Plague Purge was my sixth game project at The Game Assembly and heavily inspired by Diablo III. It was made in our custom game engine Clockwork. We basically scrapped the game engine from Eggscapism apart from the graphics engine and merged it with another engine. It was a decision made without any formal agreement between us programmers, and I had no insight into this decision as I was busy finishing Eggscapism. However, we recovered fairly fast and have since improved our cooperation a lot. I am grateful that we hit this low point as early into the project as we did, and I have learnt a lot from it.

During the project my role as the primary graphics programmer was reinforced, and I was responsible for

• Custom shader pipeline
• Debug rendering
• Deferred rendering spotlight/pointlight support
• Live shader preview
• Translucent/opaque material support
• Splitting Editor/Game
• Playtesting
• Rendering optimizations
• Shadow mapping

My proudest achievement was finishing the plain-text shader pipeline. It allowed our technical artists to create materials with pipeline state objects loaded from JSON containing bindings for custom shaders, textures, samplers, depth stencils and other necessary Direct3D 11 resources. Combined with the shader preview it allowed them to iterate visual effects very quickly, and altough I wouldn’t call the solution elegant as of now, it certainly felt so back then.