Project ETHOS
Project ETHOS is a free-to-play, 3rd-person roguelike hero shooter currently in development.
The game features a rogue-like hero shooting experience with unique play styles through evolutions of weapons and upgrades to unique hero abilities.
It features an extraction mode, gauntlet 3v3 mode, and the classic Battle Royale experience.
During my time on Project Ethos I was part of a small fresh new team of UI developers. I joined September 2022 and began working on creating high fidelity mockups for the HUD, reticle system, and utilizing UI material shaders for the rogue-like system that the game continued developing into it's most recent release of testing.
I worked alongside UX and design to flesh out some of the teams actively developing systems that are reflected in the game today.
Due to NDA, I am unable to showcase any of the work I did in-development at the time of my employment.
I can speak to the things that are publicly out there, but because the game is not fully released, I am not at liberty to share all of the details or showcase the specifics of what I worked on at the time of my employment.
The rest of the entries here will showcase UI Shader and Animation work I did during this time that did not make it into the game.
Material Work
Dot Cloud Material
I created this dot material to be used as the framework for the player image background. In making this, I added public parameters for manipulating the number of dots, distortion intensity of UVs, and a parameter for sharpening/fading the dots themselves. Additional functionality based on gameplay data can be added so that when a player is low health the dots can be tinted red and the flow intensity can increase.
The gameplay implications of this shader are to allow for the UI to react to player health to increase the feeling of urgency and fear when their health is low.
This shader is purely math based except for the use of a cloud texture.
Animation
The primary notification animation is a multi-functional widget that utilizes game data to determine the type of notification. It has the capability of doing a Primary and Secondary notification all within one animation sequence. This way, we can leverage data of the event type to determine if we need only a primary quick message, or a title with a more intricate detailed secondary notification.
During my time on this project, I learned a ton about scalability and design systems. Because this project was not as far along as a lot of the other projects I have been on, a lot of my work did not make it into every update while engineering worked on more game-breaking bug fixes.
I am really proud of the work I did on components in Figma and the scalability of the system I was able to develop by myself. One thing I would like to improve from my time on this project is moving away from generic shape styles and delve more into a stylized game aesthetic with more color and vibrancy.