The Game
Ceramic Soul is an adventure-horror puzzle game in which Yu, a porcelain doll, is brought to life and must escape a dark, cursed mansion filled with deadly apparitions. The game features a mechanic where Yu can detach her hand and send it crawling through narrow vents.
The Team
Soul Soup was a team of 28 people. Roles on the team consisted of various artistic, technical, and design disciplines.
Development
Ceramic Soul was developed using Unreal Engine 4. I joined the team rather late in its development, and had no experience with Unreal Engine at the time. As a result, I focused my efforts on less critical areas of the technical pipeline, such as material blueprints, VFX, and UI implementation.
My Contribution
Material Effects
Since the game takes place during a thunderstorm, I made a material effect that, when applied to a glass window, would cause the window to flash white for a few frames.
This Material Layer Blend blueprint blends an existing glass material with a white emissive material.
Using the “strength” parameter, the white emissive material’s visibility can be adjusted using a Timeline node.
UI Dissolve
Created a material that fades a UI icon to a flat color (in this example, magenta) and then gradually dissolves it to the fringes using a “dissolve amount” parameter.
In game, black areas would be masked out.
Cherry Blossom Particles
Using UE4’s Niagara, I made a particle system that simulates pink cherry blossom petals flowing in the wind. This helped enhance the aesthetic feel of the game.
Options Menu
With UE4’s widget and blueprint system, I created various options in the option menu, complete with resolution and window mode switch functionality.
This involved editing the options menu widget, writing an INI file, making enumerators to handle state changes, and making custom events and macros.
