Last Broadcast
Roles: Tech Artist, Lighting, 3D Generalist
25 People | 9 Months
Last Broadcast is a 3D narrative game set in a small radio station at the end of the world. Players assume the role of D-Jay, a charismatic radio host who is giving their last show as the sun turns red and the world burns around them.
As a Technical Artist, I used the Unity Engine's lighting tools and Shader Graph in conjunction with writing my own tools to make the beats defined by our Art and Narrative teams possible.
You can see my work in the dynamic sky system, destructible mesh system, interior lighting and particles, character impairment system, and earthquake effect.
This work was done as a volunteer on an MFA project at the USC Interactive Media and Game Design Master's program. Download and Play here!
Itch: lastbroadcast.itch.io/game
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2508870/Last_Broadcast/
This Skybox Shader was made with Unity Shadergraph. It has inputs to determine the appearance of the sky, horizon, stars, sun size, color & direction, and cloud color, movement & height. We needed the skybox to be able to shift colors during runtime because the game is divided into different acts with different narrative beats, so we wanted to be able to change the sky beat by beat rather than force a day/night system. It was also important that the Skybox be able to change on-screen since the player is relegated to the 4 rooms of the radio station as they interact with callers to progress the narrative, it's important to give them as much visual stimulus as possible.
The color change works by scrolling through a gradient value for both the sky and the horizon with a float clamped from 0 to 1. The number of skies is tracked by an Enum in a script, and the change can be called through a public function from the GameManager that lerps through the gradient to reach the position specified by the Enum value. This allows us to have as many different sky variations as needed!
Scene lighting consists of a combination of static spotlights and emissive materials to get the lampshade and neon appearance. The post-processing effects applied on the local volume are a faint orange Vignette, Bloom, ACES Tonemapping, Bokeh Depth of Field, and a slight increase in Saturation and White Balance Temperature. The design and narrative teams wanted the lighting to emphasize the comfort and quietness of the radio station, but also bring out the intensity of the colors during the apocalypse outside.
