Relic

Relic was my capstone project at DigiPen, built by the team Synaptic Sugar using DigiPen's in-house Zero Engine — a 3D action adventure game that was one of the most technically ambitious projects attempted in that engine at the time. I owned all of the visual technical work and pushed the engine well past its documented limits to meet the game's visual goals.

The project won First Place for Best Spoken Dialog and Best Characters at the 2015 DigiPen Student Showcase and was exhibited at PAX West 2015.

Visual Systems

Zero Engine had no atmosphere or post-processing system. To achieve the atmospheric depth the game needed, I built custom shaders that faked atmospheric scattering using depth values and fog density curves. The engine's material system wasn't designed for this kind of use, so the shaders had to work around several documented limitations — in some cases, treating material parameters as proxy inputs for calculations the engine wasn't exposing directly.

The full scope of visual work: FX, lighting, atmospherics, materials, rendering and asset pipelines, rigging, character model, and environment art placement. This was sole ownership across every visual system on a large team project — the kind of scope that requires understanding the constraints of every adjacent system well enough to know when something needs to escalate and when it can be worked around.

Working with the Engine

Several of the project's visual goals ran directly into documented engine limitations. Rather than working around them indefinitely, I went directly to the chief engineer to understand what was actually blocking each goal and whether a solution was possible at the engine level. I came with specific descriptions of what I needed to achieve and proposals for what engine changes might enable it. He implemented several of those changes during production as a result — changes that benefited other teams using the engine after our project shipped.

This is a pattern that shows up in the QA work too: finding the systemic cause rather than patching the symptom, and communicating it to whoever can actually fix it. The DigiPen work was where that habit started.

Production Leadership

Midway through production, the team was struggling with unified direction across a large group. I led a strike team that re-evaluated scope, identified what was actually achievable, and helped transition the team to a structure where department leads had collaborative ownership rather than waiting for top-down direction. The team stabilized and shipped.