So after going over your level design budget trying to figure out how those darn attractive tiles connect to each other, you finally figure it out and have a level. Congratulations! Your game is complete and now you can release and retire to a Nepalese Monk Monastery. Wait, what do you mean the level is bare and has none of that extra juice?

You let out a loud groan of despair and shake your fist at the user who ruined your retirement plans. As you return to the lowly confines of your office, you plan how you’re going to make the level built by Luke the Wondrous the most amazing level yet seen in the game. You’re young, idealistic and invincible. What can you add that suits your greatness? Which type of effect can be found littered throughout every triple A game? That’s right, post-processing effects.

Nothing can bring you down now, for you possess the power of post-processing effects! Now let’s see them say there is nothing to do! Now let’s see if they can find all the secret effects littered throughout the level to unlock the secret super badazz effect boss that can only be beaten with the power of love.

Shadows of Adam is using two methods to handle post-processing effects; the first, and main method, is using WebGL to render advanced effects in real-time that require full image awareness. Our second, and fallback/OMGNOWEBGL, method is to use native canvas API capabilities to either fake the desired result through hackery, or imitate the effect exactly, but with a noticeable performance hit. Our planned minimum hardware specifications for release is a AMD E3-350 CPU with a AMD Radeon HD 6310 video card; This is pretty low-end hardware, and is primarily found in cheap notebooks or media/playback machines, so hopefully the vast majority of the players will not have any problem playing the game with all of the post-processing effects firing off at it’s highest quality setting.

I initially had a lengthy article planned about how these effects work in our game, but this post is already a few hours behind schedule and I’ve gone and borked the entire game:

and I may be using a tiny bit too much VRAM

So I’ll leave a bunch of images at the bottom, along with a GIF, and use the time-tested excuse of “It’s a feature” and see myself out….

Okay fine, I’ll fix it. Only because you, the reader, are awesome and deserve a product that works.