TOMEBOUND
Project Type
Puzzle/Dungeon Crawler
Date
Sep 2023 - May 2024, Sep 2024 - Jan 2025
Role
3D Artist - VFX and Shaders
Project Brief
Tomebound is a Roguelite Dungeon Crawler that mixes tactical combat, environmental puzzle-solving and light platforming, built for both solo and co-op play.
My role in this project involved designing a range of visually impressive, stylised shaders and visual effects in Unity. This page showcases my different tasks with a brief description of each shader/VFX and what I used to achieve them.
Read more on Tomebound here: https://www.rara-games.com/tomebound/
KEY CONTRIBUTIONS
LAVA SHADER AND IDLE EFFECTS
This first shader includes a stylised, flowing cell-based lava pattern that appropriately fits into the games tile/grid based movement and object placement system.
Also included is a cartoony lava bubble particle effect that features randomly generating and inflating bubbles with a visual popping effect.
PORTAL CHARACTER ABILITY VFX
The portal is one of the abilities the player uses to solve each puzzle in different ways, so it was important to create a memorable design.
This ability was designed using a mix of particle systems, shaders and VFX graphs to create an entrance and exit portal. Also included is a stylised, bouncy spawning animation and an object dissolve shader to add more immersion when transporting objects with the portal.
TORCH PARTICLE SYSTEMS
This task had me design a traditional, stylised torch particle system.
During this task, I got to dive deeper into particle systems and experiment with their different features to achieve the perfect stylised torch particle effects.
FIRE TORNADO VFX AND SHADERS
The fire tornado VFX was one of my more impressive feats in this project and involved creating a start-up animation/VFX for one of the enemy characters in Tomebound.
This visual effect includes a base tornado shader used across multiple different VFX outputs, each with different nodes and values. Additionally, I designed a simple fade-in and out effect using animation curves and created ember-like idle particles that linger after the main tornado event ended.
CHARACTER SELECTION OUTLINE SHADER
As Tomebound features multiple playable characters, it is important to know which one is currently selected for player input. This task involved creating shaders and particle systems with different visual designs to match the profile of each character.
I explored the use of Unity's render objects and features to create a range of rules to ensure the outline shaders displayed perfectly in relation to the levels and environments.
