afterlife
2021–2022 · DigiPen Institute of Technology – SIT · Team project · Role: Graphics Lead
A
2D top-down atmospheric shooter running on a
custom C++ game engine written from scratch with an
OpenGL renderer — no commercial engine underneath. Players command a squad of up to
four switchable characters, using weaponry and explosives to clear procedurally arranged, zombie-filled buildings.
Role and responsibilities
Graphics lead — owner of the rendering side of the engine:
- Designed and built the OpenGL rendering system: the render pipeline, batching, and the engine’s graphics-facing API for the rest of the team
- Shader programming, with a focus on dynamic lighting and special effects — the core of the game’s atmosphere
- Researched and implemented rendering optimizations that cut both CPU and GPU cost, creating the headroom that made dynamic lighting and particle effects affordable in the first place
- Debugged and fixed cross-system graphics and gameplay bugs, including issues that originated outside my own subsystem
- Acted as the interface between the graphics side and the gameplay, design, and art teams
Learning outcomes
- Building an optimized OpenGL rendering system from nothing — you own the abstractions, so bad ones surface as frame-time cost
- Optimization as a design enabler, not cleanup: the perf work is what bought the feature budget for lighting and particles
- Shader programming for lighting and effects
- Debugging across subsystem boundaries in a large shared C++ codebase
- Cross-team communication — negotiating what the renderer could realistically deliver against what design wanted
Build & media
| File |
Description |
AfterLife_Setup.exe |
Windows installer |
Afterlife.mp4 |
Gameplay video |
AfterlifeThumbnail.png |
Title art |
Related
Succeeded by
Teehee’s Revenge — the same graphics-lead role, taken from OpenGL to
Vulkan and from 2D to 3D.