One of the main "lab rat" features were Darkness Barriers, where we experimented a lot with different styles of darkness that helped define what Dark Veil is in the game. Therefore, Darkness Barries had many, many iterations.
In the end this simple feature developed a lot of sophisticated systems and there's more to it than meets the eye:
- The barrier consists of "floating props", the "main body" and "burn points".
- Working together with Audio Team I developed the props to move and swirl in reaction to Audio of the barrier. That also includes creating a bunch of Houdini setups to export the destroyed props with correct animations and hierarchy.
- Working with designers, I developed the "burn points" that one need to burn with a flashlight to affect the darkness - they were then spread to other things, like enemy shields and the dark goop that sometimes covers stuff...
- I also developed tools for making and exporting the "main body" shape of the barrier that, given the right particle treatment, make up the body of the barrier out of Dark Veil, a system of blur I made.
- Barriers also feature other small things like spawn effects, screen effects when getting close & getting damaged
This setup ended up being quite complex, but thanks to the power of Documentation we have managed to spread the barrier-making knowledge in the team and replicate many barriers in many places in the game. Special shoutout to John McKenna that I know took care of a lot of barriers himself.
The alley barrier, being the first one the player confronts in the game. I iterated over it a lot, the end visuals were tweaked by other VFX artists.
A barrier made not by me, but by John McKenna, who used my tools and documentation to replicate the Barrier to many other places in the game!