Afterparty
Two best college buds go on the adventure of an afterlifetime. Starring Janina Gavankar, Khoi Dao, and Ashly Burch, this comedy-adventure-bender casts the player as both Milo and Lola as they venture through the depths of hell with one goal: outdrink Satan, the prince of partying, or remain in the underworld forever.
Role: Lead Developer, Producer
Release: October 2019
Engine: Unity
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Team Size: 12-20
Contributions Overview
Led a small engineering team, setting goals, running code reviews, and managing careers
Developed production pipelines for the entire team
Ran standups and maintained Jira tasks
Developed our tech art style and pipeline, including writing a hybrid PBR/Toon deferred render shader and designing a concept art projection-mapping workflow
Wrote a custom terrain shader with height blending, vertex splat maps, and tessellation
Implemented and animated all UI surfaces
“Tackling some heady ideas with a down-to-earth approach makes Afterparty’s raucous, emotionally moving night in Hell one to remember. 8.5/10”
“Night School Studio has created one of the funniest games ever made. 9.5/10”
“...a thoroughly enjoyable narrative experience that draws you into a hellish world that you (ironically) won’t want to leave. 9/10”
Contributions
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Diegetic Main Menu
I created this menu from top to bottom (minus models and character animations) after seeing some excellent concepts from Beverly Chen. The menu begins on a closeup of a just-dropped beer bottle, and the camera rolls around the world based on menu context.
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Hybrid 2D/3D Workflow
We had a small art team with limited 3D resources, but wanted a world that reacted. tolight in realistic ways. To solve this, I worked with the art team to develop a environment workflow that leveraged the illustrator-heavy skillset we had. We start by breaking up a front-view concept piece into PBR maps (diffuse, normal and emission) and projection-mapped them to simple geometry after the fact.
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Liquid Courage
The realtime dialogue system from OXENFREE made a return, with some improvements. My engineering team extended the system to include “liquid courage” options, which the player has access to only after drinking a corresponding adult beverage. This system extension kept the writers’ and designers’ needs in mind, letting them configure how the liquid courage options responded to drink choices. We used custom shaders on the UI and screen to make the world look “wobbly” in this state.
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Hybrid Deferred Shader
We wanted characters to pop in complex realistic lighting conditions and emphasize the neon-drenched world of Nowhere. Since we were using a deferred render pipeline, I wrote a custom light shader that leveraged a spare G buffer channel to render characters with colorful backlight highlights that reacted to the same lights as the environment differently.
Videos
As lead dev, I was determined to allow players to play the game in as many ways as possible. One of these features was a mouse-only mode. Players can move their character, select dialogue choices, play many games, and more, all with just one hand on the mouse.
A tour of the in-game pause menu. I worked with our art and design teams to conceptualize each screen and align on the feature’s goals, and implemented all game logic and animations. The “Bickr” screen was dynamically populated over play time based on in-game events and rule-based RNG.
A sample of the main menu. I took concept art and 3D models and turned it into this.
We paid an increasing amount of attention to the timing and performance of the voice acting and animation compared to OXENFREE to land jokes in Afterparty. It was up to the design team to land this organic cinematic design. I shepherded a lot of this scripting exactness to make sure the game was fun to play and watch.
Sam (voiced by Ashly Burch) ferries the main characters from location to location. This doubles as downtime for talking heads and as an area load mask.
