Weeks of Geometry Nodes and Trailer Creation

Over the last two weeks, I refactored some of my procedural generation tool, created a simple pixel art post-process shader, started learning the basics of geometry nodes in Blender, and started work on the trailer for Protocol Xeno. I also participated in the GMTK Game Jam 2022 and created the game Demons & Dice.

Pixel Art Shader

I had recently stumbled across a really impressive pixel art shader and It inspired me to emulate it. I wanted the shader to do more than just pixelize the screen. I wanted to make any object look like it was created by a pixel artist and for the objects to look like 2D images. To accomplish this I added a cell shader and edge detection to the shader. The cell shader also allowed for adjustments of shadow, midtone, and highlight colors independently as well as control over the number of shadow bands. The size of the pixels was also adjustable through the shader's parameters.

Overall I'm happy with this simple shader, but I would like to increase the shadow quality so that shadows would create clean lines as opposed to fuzzy borders. I tried accomplishing this by applying a blur after my cell shader but that wasn't performant. I think looking into changing the lighting settings in the editor instead might lead to the result I want.

Blender Geometry Nodes Experimentation

Geometry nodes have always seemed like a really cool concept and I wanted models to be able to test out my post-process and terrain generation tool. I started out by watching a few beginner tutorials to get the hang of how the system worked and then started experimenting with trying to make a procedural floating sky island generator and a tree generator. I think the floating island generator is decent although the islands lack character, so I started work on a tree creator that I could use to decorate the islands. Overall the system is very unfished and simple but I hope to keep expanding on it.

Protocol Xeno Trailer

In preparation for the release of Protocol Xeno on Steam, I needed to create a trailer. Initially, I was lost as to what to put in the trailer, but after a helpful Youtube video and some brainstorming with another teammate, I had a simple storyboard for the trailer. In order to record the footage I needed, I added many cheats to the game so that getting to any point in the game progression was easy and so that I could manually span in several different things. Right now, the trailer is still a work in progress as I plan on adding an additional clip improving the audio editing and sending it to the rest of the team for feedback.