The Work
The Final Shape was the expansion that ended the Darkness saga. A saga spanning the start of Destiny 1 to the release of this expansion. A time period of 10 years. It was an exciting expansion to work on and I got to work on some of the elements that would last forever.
One of these things was I got to create the node for the new destination, The Pale Heart of the Traveler. This is a destination within the traveler itself after The Witness ripped a portal onto its surface. Getting to create the portal was quite fun, but also had some challenges. I worked closely with the visual designer to get as close to the visuals that we see in game of the portal. This had us using a lot of UV animations, and managed to use only a single mask.
Opening the portal was also a nice animation that required setup between two unconnected elements, the node itself, and the Earth so that we could spill the light onto its surface. Having the portal interior was also a UV math based animation to get the mask effect without having to use an actual mask.
Another thing that we did on this screen was the dark swirls in the background of the director before players had defeated The Witness. This takes up a lot of screen space, so we didn't want to use a mask that large as it would be quite resource heavy. Instead we went with a bitmap sandwich. We have two versions of the background bitmap and the same parallax layer. One has alpha holes in it where the swirls would be, and the other does not. So if layered on top of each other you can animate something inbetween them that would show through the alpha, but when it's not visible it just shows the background. This was much cheaper than a mask and had the same effect. I created a white cloudy noise bitmap and did somewhat similar animations to the portal to have it all move toward the center, but with a slight rotation for variability.
Another one of the things done for this release was we added markers over allies dead bodies that showed what killed them. Whether it be a specific weapon class, an ability, or an enemy combatant type. This is the first time this content had been touched in a very very long time so I was one of the first in a long while.
Something else that hadn't been touched in a while but needed some fixing was the subtitles. We had instances where the subtitles would sometimes overlap with important UI elements such as toasts, or the mega boss health bar. I took the opportunity to try to implement a modular fix for this that could determine if one of those types of elements was present on screen, have it grab the dimensions of that element, and smoothly transition out of the way of those elements so that they wouldn't overlap, and then return to its original position once that element was gone.
This was set up in a way that wouldn't require people to create an exception every time they created a new toast or if they decided to move something like the megaboss healthbar to the top of the screen. The subtitles could determine if they were actually in the way or not, and decide whether or not to move. This change has been around for about 2 years now, and hasn't had any issues and I'm quite happy with it.