Rachel Sakura Perry

Work Experience

Overwatch 2

Worked on Battle Pass and Challenge screens and associated features as a Gameplay Features intern on Overwatch 2 at Blizzard.

Projects

Viewport

Experimental visual novel where you use windows to reveal hidden thoughts. Made in Unity for the Unlikely Collaborators Game Jam.

Engineer (C#, HLSL), Designer, Artist

Bugnauts! (WIP)

Third-person action game that mixes accessible 3D projectile gameplay with environmental education. Made in UE5.

Lead UI Designer & Engineer (C++), Tech Artist

Quiet is the Eyes

Suspenseful 2D puzzle side-scroller following a scientist trying to escape an abandoned laboratory. Made in Unity.

Engineer (C#), Designer (Systems), Artist

STARWEAVE

Tatical RPG about intertwined fates, constricting roles, and breaking out of an oppressive cycle. Made in Unity.

Lead VFX Artist (Unity Particle System)

Bloompunk

Resource management FPS roguelike where your weapons & abilities are alive and need to be continuously fed. Made in Unity.

Concept Artist, UI Artist

Class Projects

UE5 Networked Multiplayer FPS

Class project made using UE5, with replicated game mechanics (weapon firing, chat, scoring, etc.) and Steam multiplayer support.

• Contact for Code

DirectX 11 Game Engine

3D game engine with rendering, collision, and physics subsystems. Made using DirectX 11, C++, HLSL, and a JSON asset pipeline.

• Contact for Code

Bugnauts! is a single-player third-person action game that mixes accessible 3D projectile gameplay with environmental education, balancing playful combat and discovery of the world.

UI/UX

I was in charge of most of the design, art and programming for the UI in the game. The biggest UI I worked on was what we called the Field Guide, which was a Pokedex-esque journal that the player could access.I set up the entire system for this UI. At the beginning of the game, all of the journal entries are locked. As the player progresses through the game, they unlock entries through a variety of means (collecting bugs, defeating enemies, etc.) which unlocks things such as combat tips, concept art, real-world bug information, and more.

Above all else, I prioritized designing UI that was fun to look at and play with. Here is the UI I designed and implemented for the player's health and projectile inventory.

Screens

These screens are from the inital build at the end of the school year. Some of the assets used in these screens are being reworked by me currently.

Art

Design

The theme for this game jam was Perception Box which, according to Unlikely Collaborators, refers to the mental box that houses our beliefs, biases, and perspectives. This box "inhibits our ability to understand one another," and so the expectation was for us to create a game that challenged the player's perspective.I came up with the idea of our main mechanic being tied to color theory RGB filters, with each filter representing a one-sided perspective. Ideally, the climax or ending of our game would involve putting all three filters together in order to form the full picture. We referred to this worksheet provided by Unlikely Collaborators as inspiration for the mother/son narrative.The player uses the filters to reveal what the son is thinking and in order to try and respond appropriately. We weren't able to execute this well, but the idea was that by seeing 2-3 perspectives at a time, the player would be able to understand what the son wants from the mom at that point in the conversation. These were the emotions we decided each color to represent:Red : Anger or Passion
Blue: Sadness
Green: Envy
Cyan: Longing
Magenta: Frustration
Yellow: Anxiety or Overwhelmed

Programming

The main thing I was in charge of was the shader for the colored filters. The way this worked is that I created two stencil shaders, one for masking and one for rendering. There were 3 materials created from the mask stencil (masks for red, green and blue) and 7 materials created from the render stencil (red, blue, green, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white).The mask stencil has an ID property that can be assigned 1, 2 or 4 (for R = 001, G = 010, and B = 100), which it writes to the stencil buffer for each pixel. If two masks overlapped on a pixel e.g. red and green, then the resulting stencil buffer value would be 011 = 3, or yellow.The render stencil also has an ID property that can be assigned 1 through 7 (for each color). It simply reads the stencil buffer and only renders pixels where the stencil buffer value equals its ID value, e.g. the material for "yellow" has an ID and object with this material only renders pixels where the stencil buffer value is 3.The render stencil pass is done after the mask stencil pass.

The colors you see for the filters aren't actually from the shader. Each filter window is a prefab, with a "filter" child (assigned the mask stencil) and 7 "color" children (assigned the render stencil).

Gallery

Programming & Design

- Designed and coded three prototypes during ideation exploring hiding, heartbeat and monster mechanics
- Iterated upon and implemented puzzles, hiding functionality, and quick time evens
- Scripted player controller and object interaction system
- Scripted level loader, audio manager, and UI (main menu, pause menu, settings)
- Scripted custom YarnSpinner commands for cutscenes, streamlining the cutscene implementation process
- Customized YarnSpinner dialogue runner to emulate talking via punctuation pauses, randomized mouth animation (for the dialogue sprite) and randomized pitch adjustment (for the dialogue blip audio)

Art

- Designed the layout for all levels and labs in the game
- Created the key art and logo for the game (for promotional use)
- Created 10 dialogue portraits for the player, with blinking and mouth animation frames
- Created all artwork for the puzzle pop-ups
- Created all 100+ sprites for level props and interactable objects
- Created and animated an idle, running, and hiding sprite for the player
- Created and animated the monster sprite

Gallery

VFX

Concept Art

UI/UX

👋 Hello! I'm Rachel, a recent graduate from the University of Southern California with a BS in Computer Science and a concentration in games.I'm currently residing in Los Angeles, but I was born and raised in Sagamihara, Japan. I've traveled a lot between (and within!) the United States and Japan. Recent cities I've visited are: San Francisco, Osaka, and Kyoto!I love making art, eating good food, detectives (and by extension, phantom thieves), and gaming! I'm always eager to try new things and broaden my life experiences, and I especially love pouring those experiences into my games.My work is focused in gameplay programming and design, as well as UI/UX and technical art.

Full Credits