What Did You Do?

Kitsault is a story about a young boy who moved to a small, mostly abandoned town in British Columbia, Canada. The town was built in the 1970s as a mining town, but the mine closed down shortly after, leaving the town mostly empty. The story follows the boy as he explores the town and learns about its history and the people who lived there. The project is a combination of interactive storytelling, game design, and environmental art, heavily inspired by the Red Matter games by Vertical Robot and Half-Life Alyx by Valve. The project is built in a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 4.27 and is a work in progress. The goal of the project is to create an immersive experience that allows players to explore the town and learn about its history through interactive storytelling and environmental design.

Some scenes captured from the Quest 3:

I had some goals I wanted to accomplish with this project. I wanted to create parallax corrected reflection cubemaps for any surface that would have a slight amount of reflection. I also create a custom hlsl node that allowed me to recreate an analytical light laser reflection that has accurate reflections on surfaces depending on their roughness, and that would change color depending on the actor tag the beam encountered.

Optimization and Shader Development:

Water has always created considerable challenges in VR, especially on the Quest 2 and 3. I created a custom water shader that was optimized for the Quest platform, allowing for realistic water effects without sacrificing performance. The shader was designed to work with the existing lighting and post-processing effects in the project, ensuring a seamless visual experience. It was a challenging task, but the end result was a significant improvement in the visual quality of the water in the project.