Trailblazers

Trailblazers is a multiplayer "Level Design" game where players create obstacle courses for their friends to race. It is intended for 2-4 players, and can be played using keyboard or controllers. It was a 5-Week project, and my role was primarily Designer and Tech Artist, though I had my hands in just about every part of development.

Each round of Trailblazers is broken up into two phases: A Building-Phase, and a Racing-Phase. During the building phase, each player is assigned 7 random obstacles, and they each have 40 seconds to build their course by moving the obstacles, mirroring them, and placing them. Then, each player is assigned a random course from another player to race, and players earn points for running their course quickly and for designing the course that gave their friends the most trouble. Trailblazers also features a Sandbox Mode where you can test out different combinations or systems on your own by placing down however many obstacles you want, and then running the course yourself.

I had a wide variety of roles on Trailblazers, as I did quite a bit of programming and quite a bit of environment art. However, my main contribution to the project was setting up the shading system and some of the visual effects for the game.

My Tasks

-A system of shaders for look development for the game. It supported hand-painted textures and a cartoonish style of lighting, with attributes for artists to edit in terms of ambient occlusion and fresnel light wrapping.

-Created some of the visual effects for the obstacles.

-Multiple special effect shaders, such as the toggle placement system for the obstacles and a scrolling shader for the boost platforms.

-Modeled a large number of the the obstacles.

-Hand-painted textures for the obstacles.

-Rigged and animated some of the obstacles, such as the log traps and the pendulum.

-Rigged the character for animation.

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy Trailblazers!