SPITE: THE CURSE OF TZALOZEL
Fall 2025
This is a collection of VFX highlights created in HLSL for the fifth game project during my time at The Game Assembly.
HLSL VFX CODING
As mentioned earlier, all of the VFX had to be created by writing them in HLSL. The pipeline for the VFX was to first create the desired VFX in Unreal Engine and then rewrite the effect in HLSL in Visual Studio. The results were then visible inside our engine and tweaked thereafter solely inside the engine. All the textures were created in Substance Designer and packed into different channels to manipulate the textures separately.
In this project, I was responsible for creating:
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Health and Energy Orb
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Various UI and HUD Shaders, like ability cooldown and recharge
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Enemy and boss health bars
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Player Wing Dash VFX
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Health Pickup
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Ability Unlock
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First part of the Stun Spell attack
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Blue Lantern
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Checkpoint
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Torch
HEALTH & MANA ORB
The UI orbs represent the health and energy of the player during gameplay.
The health orb (left circle) is inspired by the main character's golden tattoos that shine on her arms. I wanted to represent that same golden look in her health. The energy orb (right circle) represents her connection to nature, which goes together with her abilities that are also green.
The HLSL shader is built out of packed RGB textures that are panning in different directions to create movement on the sprite.
Health orb shader in editor
Energy orb shader in editor
DASH - PLAYER VFX
This dash VFX was created by combining a flat plane with a wing texture, together with four particle emitters that generate a trail effect during the player's dash animation.
CHECKPOINT VFX
This VFX was created by combining a fire flipbook rendered from Unreal Engine with two particle emitters that triggered when the player entered the proximity of the checkpoint.