Hey there everyone and welcome to my first Dev Log for the upcoming development cycle! I am getting close to the end of the development (crazy I know), so it’s time to bring back these updates on a regular cadence.

Today, I want to take a look at a room that I designed for the game and teased in our last update, that includes a few interesting mechanics, and how I went about creating it.

The Portal Room:

The Inspiration:

Unlike most game developers, I am a scientist at heart. This means that geometries, especially those of a non-euclidean nature, have always been particularly satisfying to imagine and create.

If you grew up in the nineties, or even watched cartoons, you would’ve seen these geometries. One that will never go out of style and that struck me a lot as a kid, was the Scooby Doo corridor chase! Who remembers this?

I always thought those scenes were funny when I was younger, but they’re also frightening in a sense if you think about it. Alongside the physical absurdities in those scenes that our brains can’t process properly, there’s also clearly a danger running after those characters, with no way to know where it’s coming from or where it is going.

These geometries have also been used in video games as well as animation. We see it in video game classics such as the portal series for example, as well as in more modern titles such as the amazing Superliminal!

So from the very beginning, I knew I wanted this in my game! I wasn’t super excited about adding a gun to shoot portals however, so I used what I had at my disposal: Two players, a space I could modulate at will, and a source of danger coming after you. Thanks to Scooby Doo, all I had to do was to implement it in-game!



The Technique:

With all of that in mind, and having done the research, I went about finding solutions to make it happen in the Unreal Engine. Programming-wise, non-euclidean geometries are very interesting to look at, but quite tricky to implement. Depending on how the game is made, it can be a walk in the park (not like central park though, more like a northern alaskan park with polar bears).

Typically a game relying on cast casting or path tracing has a much easier time dealing with those kinds of geometries. Unfortunately for me, The Amulet of AmunRun follows a much more traditional rendering approach which forced me to use other tricks. I did not reinvent the wheel however and went with the standard trick in the trick book; rendering the scene multiple times. So looking through the portal is like looking through a TV that changes the camera viewpoint based on where you are relative to the TV.



And this is how you get an ancient pyramid Scooby Doo chase! Fascinating, right? I’ll not be spoiling what’s chasing you today however. ;) You’ll have to find for yourself in The Amulet of Amunrun, coming soon!

I hope you enjoyed my devlog and found it interesting. Rest assured, throughout 2022, I’ll be back very soon with more!

In the meantime, you can try the Demo, and let me know what you think in our Discord!

Take care!

Louis
Fruits of Yggdrasil Sarl