Alex Nogueira
Team Lead & Technical Artist
Hi, my name is Alex!
I'm an aspiring Game Programmer and a member of team Red Axes, currently developing a Norse Mythology themed Hack n' Slash game called Norsevar.
My main focus is on making the Terrain (Snow) shader, creating VFX, Programming up some systems for the various special effects and Leading the Red Axes team. This means that I create shaders, program up systems for various game events in order to add VFX to the game to bring it more to life and light, prepare, and optimize our environments and scenes. I also lead meetings and try to keep everyone on the same page about the project, our goals and our strategy for achieving those goals.
My goal is to make our game look and feel good. I want the game to provide feedback to our player in how he is doing and make the player experience a beautiful and responsive environment while he's exploring it. Code-wise the enemies do take damage when the player hits them. But what really drives that point home to the player is that when the hit connects, blood sprays around, the enemy staggers back and the hit particles show where you've hit them. The player's interactions need to impact the environment around him in order to make a great game, and my job is to make that environment look good and feel good by providing exactly that functionality.
You can check out my work for this project below.
About
Norsevar
Norsevar is a Norse mythology-themed roguelite dungeon crawler game with a Hack n’ Slash combat system, in which the player plays as a Viking with a one-handed axe and a shield, fighting his way through randomly generated rooms filled with enemies. Visit our Team Mahara page for more information.
Technical
Art
One of my primary roles in this project consists of developing shaders for the game. This mainly concerns the Snow Terrain Shader, which can be displaced by other Rendered Objects, but it also applies to a few custom Shaders that are used for Particle systems in order to achieve a desired effect. Click on "More Details" below to get more information about the different techniques and approaches i've taken to develop the Snow shader and more.
Game
Feedback Systems
Another part of my secondary role is developing functionality for our game. Developing effects that look good is not the only part that needs to get done in order to make a game look good. The effects need to actually be implemented in the game as well! In this section, I want to show my technical capabilities by demonstrating the approach I've taken to implement the responses to various events that occur in our game. Click on "More Details" below to get a peek into how we've approached handling stuff that happens in our game.
VFX & Env
Artist
One of my secondary roles is creating Environments and VFX. This concerns mainly the creation of Particle Systems and the Placement of Meshes in the Game World as well as setting Rendering settings on those Meshes and Light settings for the scene, as well as creating the Post Process effects that our game uses. Click on "More Details" to take a look at my procedures for creating Environments and techniques for creating Particle Systems.
Team
Lead
Another main role of mine is being the team lead of Red Axes. I am responsible for making sure that everyone's voice gets heard and everyone's time gets respected. I try to keep the team on the same page at all times and make sure that we are aligned with our goals, and we have strategies to reach our goals. For further information, click on "More Details" below.
Technical
Journal
Throughout the development of Norsevar, I documented my work on sprint by sprint basis in a technical journal. Entries contain detailed descriptions on my tasks, as well as the challenges that I had to overcome during development. Click on "More Details" below to take a look at my technical journal.
Credit to Paul Bichler for the Mahara Theme. Here's a Link to his Portfolio.