That Blooming Feeling
2017
A gardening videopicturebook about welcoming a youthful joy into our selves.
Made with the Tots Team (Jack Campbell, Michala Braker, Mariah Hale, Murray Campbell, and John Groot)
Shown at Indiecade, BitBash, XOXO, Cinekid Festival, and BitxBit. Also see: RockPaperShotgun Article
About That Blooming Feeling
I modeled and animated all of the plants and environmental props and developed technology for vertex deformation based on your position in relationship to objects. You can read more about those things by folding out the tabs below.
I developed a system based on the GDC 2017 talk: “Technical Art Techniques of Naughty Dog: Vertex Shaders and Beyond” I created a buffer of cards underneath objects which plants could respond to by comparing their positions in world space. These particular plants have blendshapes baked into their vertex colors and lerp into them based on how affected they are by the players imprint.
I modeled, animated, and developed scripts for growing plants in That Blooming Feeling. Each leaf is animated modularly and instantiated with different blending properties along a stem. No two plants are exactly alike in the game.
One interesting trick we landed on in development was blending between animations of stems in order to make trees unique. I later wrote shaders for changing palette and vertex shader driven wind effects. Here are a couple of early tests for the game played at full speed.
(other cool visual tech things include: global wind with variable speeds! global color shaders for palette changes! fancy player material with blurring and refraction! vertex shaders for inflating the player! player face that sticks to the body! spherification!)