Developed by Harebrained Schemes

Published by Paradox Interactive

Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux

Release date: April, 2018

My Work

BATTLETECH is a turn based strategy game based on the pen and paper game of the same name. The game finds the player as the leader of a mercenary company caught up in a war to retake the throne of a world in the Periphery of known space.

My second Unity game, I took everything I had learned on Necropolis and took it to the next level. The built in light system was completely replaced with a cluster based lighting system capable of managing its own shadowmaps. This was paired with a custom frustum aligned volumetric fog system, improved deferred decals, a physically based sky system, support for linear lights and many enhancements to the post process system. I built a new mood system, one that interfaced with all the rendering systems that I designed, to collect all the lighting and post processing settings one would want to use in a level. Then, in concert with the art leads, authored all moods used for each of our biomes to represent the worlds on the outer edge of the Inner Sphere from lifeless moons to lush jungles. Custom shaders were developed for our Mechs to show damage and your crew’s colors and a new terrain and tree rendering system were developed to take the data contained in Unity and render it more efficiently for our specific use case.

In addition to these combat levels, I was also heavily involved in the “simgame” between missions. Here we see your ship the Argo, both inside as you interact with your crew and your mechs and outside as you traverse the star systems of the galaxy. For this I developed some semi-procedural planet shaders, a raymarched cloud shader and a physically based atmosphere shader capable of simulating a sunset in orbit. I also lit and animated all of our space transition sequences and built much of the infrastructure to manage camera movement and rendering in this section of the game.

Post release, I worked on the Urban Warfare DLC which included cityscapes and destructible buildings. Here I worked closely with the art team to replace our old physics based destruction system with one that used prebaked data generated from Houdini, as well as taking point on reducing memory usage and finding ways to optimize the game to fit these massive cities into our performance envelope.

I was the primary contributor to all lighting, shader and rendering systems work on all content on this page.

Combat

Simgame