The semester is over and my DADIU production is finally done and live! Go and play Distorpia here! You’re an agent of the HUD corporation and you have to clean up after them as their experiments with the digital dimension went wrong. The game was developed during the course of 6 weeks with 16 people.

I was the Lead Programmer in this production. Being the Lead Programmer I hardly got to do any coding, but there is one thing I would describe as my work which is the effect that appears when transitioning from one dimension to another. The Art Director, Jakob Kiilerich, created this vision of the transition:

He took me through all the layers of this transition and I created this image effect from it:

Try Transition Demo (explanation below)

The transition is time based and can be adjusted by setting the transition time. The actual transition time is normalized so you get the same transition no matter how long it lasts. All the effects are curve based and using the normalized time, they return a value to the effect which produces the wanted result. There are two different layers to the transition, a cutaway layer and an overlay layer.

The cutaway layer uses a grey scale image together with a variable to define what areas of the image you’re transition from are visible. Then there is a scaling of the uv coordinates for the grey scale image. The last effect works as an opacity for the from layer making the blending between the old and the new dimension more smooth.

The overlay layer has two steps to it. It has an image that is being blended onto the screen with a certain opacity. This blend mode is the same as Photoshop’s overlay blend mode. The other component to this layer is that the image is a spritesheet, so the overlay image is being animated with a set framerate.

Hopefully this wasn’t all to boring, and if you haven’t already go here to play Distorpia!