Omniscience is a 3D multiplayer side-scrolling action RPG. In this prototype, the player has access to nine unique spells and one weapon. Using the spells and weapon at his or her disposal, the player must fight alone or with friends through a small horde of enemies to defeat the boss at the end of the level. This project was developed in the span of a few weeks as part of our high school senior capstone assignment. It was then presented in front of a panel of judges where it was awarded with third place.
Omniscience was a pivotal project in developing my skills as it was the first online multiplayer game that I worked on in a collaborative setting. It was also important for demonstrating how to keep a project within a realistic scope, as the first attempt to develop a game for the project submission had to be completely scrapped. Omniscience admittedly also suffered from the curse of ambition, however we were able to develop a vertical slice within a month as a proof of concept.
The Visuals
Prior to Omniscience I had primarily worked as a gameplay programmer, opting to use hastily created placeholder artwork in the past. Regardless, I adapted quickly and produced most of the environmental artwork within the game. I developed the assets in Blender using hard-surface extrusion modeling, and created normal maps via Photoshop. In addition, I also developed most of the shaders as well. The shader that pushed my skills however was for the magma. I succeeded in creating the effect by having the texture and normal map pan at a fixed rate to simulate flow. I then made a grayscale map that would pan across as well to serve as information for the vertex displacement which allows the magma to bob up and down like a liquid. Finally, the shader was converted from diffuse to emissive in order to really sell the effect. Although such techniques are rather crude now, they were relatively new with almost no documentation on the matter at the time.
The Dungeon
Although I was not in charge of the core systems, I still had the oppurtunity to build the surrounding components of the game. Such components extended to level design and level scripting. Admittedly the levels themselves are not complex by design, but I am still proud of the visual presentation as the level itself was only intended to serve as an arena to demonstrate combat. The development of netsynced scripted events such as enemy spawning, checkpoints, etc. was also surprising seeing as I had little to no networking experience at the time. While I was disappointed that I didn't have the oppurtunity to work on the core mechanics, Omniscience was essential to rounding out my skills and getting me involved in the entire development process.
