Pokémon GO
Niantic
Pokémon GO is a GPS-based creature-collecting game from Niantic, shipping to hundreds of millions of players on iOS and Android. As a technical artist I helped across real-time rendering systems and editor tooling under tight mobile GPU and memory budgets: sky/atmosphere shaders with batch-render tools, AR lighting and shadow approximations, and the initial Mega Evolutions feature.
Sky Update
I revamped shaders on the world map as a part of a sky update. The project originally started as a hackathon with an engineer but eventually got rolled into a full update. The sky shader was updated to be a simplified version of physically based atmospheric scattering, kept cheap enough to run on low-end mobile GPUs. Previously there were only day and night color modes for the map, but I updated it to blend to sunset colors as the sun gets low and have separate color schemes depending on the weather. I also added the sun to the water reflection. To iterate on the look and feel, I created tools to batch render screenshots at various times of day / weather and to simulate a timelapse.
AR Shadows and Lighting
I prototyped improving the lighting and shadows for Pokemon in AR+ mode. I experimented with computing a light color from the input camera feed to help it blend in with the environment and updating the Pokemon BDRF shader to use the light color. I also made a shadow effect that approximates AO by rendering an orthographic depth texture for the Pokemon.
Mega Evolutions
I was the primary technical artist for the initial version of Mega Evolutions. I designed and implemented the Mega Evolution raid egg, implemented the mega evolve vfx sequence, and updated assets throughout the game to support the mega evolutions feature.
