The Last Scribe - La Mancha

I had the opportunity to work on the upcoming game The Last Scribe. My role was to develop and manage the entire environment pipeline for the game's procedurally generated levels. This presented three major technical and artistic challenges:

1. Artistic Alignment: Creating a visually stunning environment that perfectly matches the established art direction.
2. Performance Constraints: Building highly optimized tools and shaders to consistently maintain the target framerate.
3. Dynamic World-Building: Ensuring the world feels alive, reactive, and organic.

Balancing the artistic vision with technical art limitations was a highly rewarding challenge. Designing these systems, researching solutions, and developing the pipeline required a lot of effort, but seeing everything come together seamlessly in real-time made it incredibly satisfying.

Procedural Wind Shader (Real-Time Vegetation):
A key highlight of this project was developing a procedural wind system integrated directly into the foliage shaders. The goal was to achieve stylistic movement while keeping rendering costs low. Key features of the wind system:
-WPO Vertex Deformation: Drives the primary physical movement of the foliage.
-Fallback UV Distortion: Provides ambient movement when World Position Offset (WPO) is too performance-heavy, preventing static meshes.
-Texture-Driven Wind Gusts: Uses masks to simulate natural, sweeping wind patterns.
-Parameterized Controls: Exposed parameters for fine-tuning intensity, scale, and depth.
-Vertical Attenuation: Keeps the base of the grass firmly anchored to the ground.
-Frequency Breakup: Randomizes intervals so the wind never feels mechanical or uniform.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG):
To populate the levels efficiently, I developed a material-driven PCG system. This setup gave me incredible flexibility and allowed for rapid iteration when testing different biome layouts.

Environment Art & Implementation:
I modeled every asset, building, and vegetation piece, fully assembling and implementing them within Unreal Engine 5, where I also authored all shaders and systems using the Material Editor and Blueprints.

If you are interested in the game and want to support the project you can wishlist it on Steam.