THE AGE OF GLOOM
A roguelike video game tied to book release for client (project paused due to funding constraints).
A gameplay-first world of ruin and strategy—featuring eight unique wagon classes, optimized AI systems, and multithreaded world generation built for emergent chaos and survival.
Achievements
Custom Shaders
Developed a custom post-process shader to visualize one of the core mechanics of the game, the Gale vs Gloom. This dynamically saturated the environment based on proximity to the player’s lantern-lit wagon. The viewport was first desaturated, then objects that were marked as “Gale” — namely the gale-trail that follows the character — were re-saturated. This created a powerful visual contrast between the safety and encroaching danger of the gloom!
This post-process material controls the gale-gloom coloration. Using Unreal’s stencil masking, noise blending, and some handy dandy lerps, I built an optimized shader that updates in real time as the objects shrink and grow. Designed entirely in Unreal Engine's material editor, this system reinforces core gameplay through atmosphere, tension, and clarity without relying on UI.
Procedural Generation
Inspired by classic hex strategy games, The Age of Gloom builds its world from a grid of procedural hexes—each one unique every time you play. I used Unreal Engine’s Level Instances to stream in and out hundreds of tile variations without breaking performance, and built a custom multi-threaded system to load tiles in the background as the caravan moves forward. Each tile pulls from procedural rulesets that spawn assets, terrain features, and encounter points, so no two runs ever play the same. I also hand-designed each core hex with guidance from the book’s author, translating his world into something explorable, unpredictable, and alive.
The Switch to 2.5D
In order to have a more defined art style, it was determined to shift The Age of Gloom from full 3D to 2.5D. To do this, I built a custom terrain system that generates procedural ground planes with a tile-based structure. Using PaperZD and pixel art animation blueprints, I created a responsive animation system for the wagons that indicated their attacks. The result keeps the clarity of pixel art while retaining the spatial depth and complexity of a 3D world.
