Homestead Arcana: Miasma FX Overhaul

Starting Point

In Homestead Arcana, a reality-bending force called Miasma covers much of the world. The Miasma is the player’s main antagonist, and their main goal, and so needed to convey both menace and otherworldly beauty. It has two facets:

1. External - from the opening zone, you're meant to be able to look out onto the world and see that the miasma has claimed much of it. It shrouds much of the world, leaving each new zone as a mystery to encounter as players progress.

2. Internal: When inside the miasma, players should feel like they're in a landscape that has been overtaken and transformed by this force.

When I joined the project, both of these aspects were functional but underwhelming, and didn't feel as though they could carry the tone of mystery required by the title.

Objectives and Role

As art director, I led and oversaw efforts to overhaul all aspects of miasma presentation. I set visual targets, researched paths to achieve them, and guided the development and implementation of solutions.

For the external miasma FX, I contributed directly by creating shaders, designing asset pipelines, and implementing the final results.

For the internal miasma FX, I worked closely with Justin Ankenbauer, a technical artist on my staff, to design and implement the technical solution, and worked hands-on to implement it across the game.

Approach

External FX:
Externally, I used two mesh-based FX: the clouds and the walls.

The clouds are built on functions from Keijiro’s 3D noise which modify a sculpted and decimated base mesh. All the coloration is layered on top of the basic displacement by resampling the initial noise values.

The walls use simple planes for geometry. The shader implements a few simple effects together to create the sense of shifting, cold fire: a texture sampled through a flowmap, then colored via gradient, an intersection gradient (which masks secondary noise), and height-based darkening to blend into the clouds.

Internal FX:

Inside the miasma, we used a stack of fullscreen effects, both built-in and custom, to achieve a shifting, mysterious ambiance. This approach allowed us to affect visual atmosphere by tuning a single volume profile per region. Our stack consisted of:

• Volumetric fog (included in HDRP)

• Depth of field

• Custom chroma separation. This effect sampled the screen color buffer through a tunable flow map, separated colors by channel, and added the result back to the final frame (minus a spherical mask around the player, which could be tuned to have soft or hard falloff).

Together, these effects layered and tuned together gave us the ability to to define an area around the player that is sharp, to set a mysterious “dark” space beyond, and to gradually ramp out to that mysterious atmosphere via a lurid and shifting effect, which created an overall sense of mystery and otherworldly appeal.