lighting

 

Dracula A stage

This week for Stage A, I completed all my assigned tasks, including the full title screen with working buttons, the clue description/dialogue Blueprint system, and the entire intro sequence with proper camera timing and transitions. I also finished the final Dracula scare sequence and added extra polish by including a jump-out moment where Dracula lunges toward the player at the end, creating a stronger and more dramatic finale.

Dracula B Stage

 

This week I created a full run-of-show system using a Level Sequencer cutscene integrated directly into gameplay. I organized the entire flow so that when the player reaches a specific checkpoint, guiding animations appear to show where to go, the music transitions, and the player is led into the cutscene. Once the player arrives, the sequence plays automatically, and afterwards new music is cued, and a custom post-processing shader is applied. This setup ties gameplay and cinematics together smoothly and makes the experience feel more intentional and polished.

next week I will work on optimizing the scene

perforce proof

Dracula C stage

This week I built a fully interactive and optimized candle-walking system that combines PCG with a custom shader. I created a spline-based tool that uses PCG to automatically spawn candles along a path, each with its own PCG-generated flame instance. Every flame uses custom instance data so the shader can individually calculate its behavior. When the player approaches, each flame detects the player’s position and smoothly moves toward them, then begins orbiting around the player in real time. The whole system is performant, procedural, and fully shader-driven, allowing large numbers of dynamic candle flames to react interactively to gameplay.

Protomeshing - 'D' Stage

For this assignment, I created a post-processing shader that reacts to whether the main character checks over their shoulder to see if Dracula is behind them. The system works by using Blueprint logic that calculates the dot product between the camera’s forward vector and the player’s orientation vector. This determines if the player is looking forward or backward. Based on that result, a timer gradually tightens and squeezes the post-processing effect, making the view feel more tense and claustrophobic as you avoid looking back. Once the player finally turns around to look behind, the effect smoothly disappears.

Stage 1 Initial Block Out - Layout - 'F' Stage

For my block out I procedurally made a chandelier, and I ran into a few challenges along the way. First, I had to figure out how to make a concave curve that bent in both the X and Y directions to form the arms. Then I needed a way to adjust the lerp in Z so it dipped down briefly and came back up again to get the drooping effect. After that, I set up the logic for orienting the chain links so they followed the curve of the drop, this worked by taking the previous link’s position, making a vector to the current link, and rotating each link along that path. Finally, I solved how opposite links connected by adding a second point in between and rotating them perpendicularly, which gave me the proper final connection.

Use exponent 0.5

Now how do we make it dip down

if we look closely we can see where they are all pointing 

this looks so cool

ok getting closer

so we made it taller and skinnier

now we add the inter woven links