Alien Age

Studio Left Turn Studios Role Technical Artist (sole TA) Released 2021 — Steam Engine Unity

Shader Graph
HLSL
VFX
Lighting
Asset Optimization
Retopology
Texturing
Unity
Python

Alien Age is a 2D action game released on Steam in 2021 through Left Turn Studios. I was the sole Technical Artist from before the studio formally incorporated — starting as a revenue-share contributor and continuing through to ship. The work covered everything visual and technical: all shaders, all VFX, all lighting, all materials, and the full asset pipeline from raw geometry to in-engine.

Shaders

The three shaders that defined the game's look were all custom-built in Unity Shader Graph. The water surface shader uses world-space UV coordinates so the flow pattern stays consistent regardless of how geometry is oriented or placed — tiling artifacts from UV-based approaches were a problem on irregular terrain, and the world-space approach eliminated them completely.

The volumetric fog shader fakes atmospheric depth using depth texture sampling — the engine had no built-in atmosphere system, so this had to be authored from scratch. The fog density and color respond to world height, giving the environments a sense of scale that flat post-process fog can't produce.

Alien Age volumetric fog shader showing atmospheric depth in the environment — Draft — final asset TBD

The environment tile color-variation shader seeds per-tile color offsets from world position. This lets identical tile geometry read as organic and varied in the scene without needing unique texture variants for every tile type. The color range is bounded so variation stays readable as a single material rather than looking like mismatched assets.

Alien Age environment tiles showing world-position-seeded color variation shader — Draft — final asset TBD

VFX

All VFX were built in Unity's particle system. The beam pickup, beam drop, and cloud lightning effects were the most technically involved — the beam had to read as a continuous energy column while being composed of discrete particles, and timing had to sync to gameplay events without hardcoded delays.

Alien Age beam drop VFX — energy beam dropping from UFO — Draft — final asset TBD

Alien Age cloud lightning VFX — Draft — final asset TBD

Asset Pipeline

The full asset pipeline was owned from the start. Geometry went through retopology to hit polygon budgets without visual loss on the most visible surfaces. Textures were organized into indexed atlases to cut texture lookup count — a meaningful optimization for mobile-adjacent hardware targets. The approach let the game run at target frame rate with the visual quality the art direction required.

Alien Age environment tiles showing optimized geometry and texture atlas layout — Draft — final asset TBD

Procedural Foliage Tool

Late in production, level designers needed a way to populate environments with foliage without paying the runtime cost of a procedural system running in-game. I collaborated with an engineer to build an editor-time placement tool: it ran the distribution logic in the Unity editor and baked the result as placed instances, so the in-game cost was the same as hand-placed assets. The tool was documented so level designers could regenerate placements independently after level changes without coming back to engineering or tech art.