Aliens Stole My Shi**

Aliens Stole My Shi* was the second game project I worked on at The Game Assembly. The project was developed over a 14-week production periodusing a custom game engine, with Unreal Engineused as an intermediary for exporting assets and tools.

The game was heavily inspired by the stylized level design of Spyro the Dragon, focusing on colorful environments and playful platforming spaces.

During this project, thanks to technical artist Erik Svennsson, we were able to integrate Houdini Engineinto Unreal Engineand export the results to our custom engine. This allowed me to create procedural Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs)that our level designers could use to quickly generate environment assets and block out levels.

Below are some of the tools and effects I developed during the project.

Basalt Hexagon Rock Generator

This tool generates basalt-style hexagonal rock formationsdesigned to act as walls and environmental barriers for the level.

The asset was built using a spline-based workflow, allowing level designers to draw a curve that defines the shape of the rock formation. The system then procedurally generates hexagonal columns along the spline.

Several parameters were exposed so designers could easily customize the result, including:

• minimum and maximum rock height
• column width
• noise variation
• density and spacing

This tool was heavily used during level blockout and environment building, allowing designers to quickly create natural-looking rock formations that fit the level layout.

Pancake Rock Generator

The pancake rock toolwas another procedural asset designed to create stacked rock formations that help block player vision and guide movement through the environment.

The system was created in Houdiniusing a simple line as the base shape. Points are scattered along the line and projected onto the terrain surface. Each point then generates a rock layer, resulting in stacked formations resembling layered sediment or "pancake" rocks.

Several parameters were exposed for designers, including:

• rock size
• rotation variation
• noise deformation
• stack density

This allowed level designers to quickly place large environmental features while still maintaining variation across the environment.

Player Stun Effect ("Bonk" Effect)

For the player stun mechanic, I created a cartoon-style stun effect that appears above the character when they are stunned.

The effect consists of several small planet meshesthat orbit around the player’s head. The rotation of the planets is controlled using a vertex shader, where a transformation matrix drives the spinning motion.

The speed and direction of the rotation are controlled using vertex color data, allowing the effect to animate entirely on the GPU without requiring additional animation data.

Vine Generator

The Vine Generator is a procedural Houdini HDA used to create hanging vines that naturally droop, attach to surfaces, and subtly sway using a shader-driven vertex color gradient.

The system is based on a spline workflow, where curves define the main vine direction. Vines can also be attached to existing meshes allowing them to flow naturally across environmental forms.

Points are distributed along the curve and procedurally relaxed to simulate gravity-based drooping and organic variation. Noise is applied to avoid uniform shapes and enhance natural variation.

A vertex color gradient is generated along the mesh to drive subtle sway animation in the material, giving the vines a light secondary motion from root to tip.

Key parameters include:

• vine length and droop amount
• noise and variation strength
• curve resolution / density
• attachment strength to surfaces