The Dark Eye: Demonicon

Action RPG in a dark world. (Windows)

The Dark Eye – Demonicon tells the tragic story of a brother and sister who become pawns of sinister forces in a world of cruelty and depravity. In this bleak yet magical world, their affection is both a blessing and a curse. Both are constantly threatened by mortal danger and demonic temptation, and must find a way through their tortured lives by facing serious moral decisions. Their common destiny will determine that of the entire continent, and will be decided by the choices they make. Hordes of fiends block their way to freedom and peace, and only through battle and magic they will truly become free of the darkness.

My main tasks was designing and building visual effects. Mainly consisting of particles and some shaders. Although I designed some of the shaders I did not write the code for it. I also did my own debugging of my particle effects on my Xbox360 dev-kit to maintain a consistent frame-rate. Also because of my background as a motion graphics designer and video director I was also tasked to build the 29 motion graphic videos that advance the story. After I did a target animation, I broke it down into scripts and templates. After that our concept artists who also drew the panels could easily build a video without much knowledge of After Effects.
After our Art Director left the project I was asked to take over his responsibilities. This included:

• heading a team of 12 people
• lighting and mood of the game
• manage the design and execution of new levels, characters and meshes
• identifying and solving performance bottlenecks with textures and poly-counts