Polder

Play as a god in this real-time strategy game in VR

Contribution:
Material programming

During my last month being an intern at Indietopia I got the chance to work on their new entertainment game "Polder".

Polder is a real-time strategy game where you play as a god, placing a church which would then automatically form a village around that church. The players job is to protect this village by terraforming the land to prevent their village from flooding, or getting attacked by other villages.

My Work

Fog of War

For Polder I was tasked to work on a Fog of War system, a system that hides areas in the world that can later be unlocked, it's a natural way to hide the landscape if you don't want your player to be able to see the landscape or be able to go to that landscape yet.

I was told to look at "volumetric fog" and while it took a little while to understand it, I learned how to get it working in Unreal Engine.

When doing research on how to create a fog of war, I was able to create this material. which is for the volumetric fog itself.


I want to make it clear that while I more or less understand this material and how it's made, I am not the one that came up with this material.

I was able to make it work and it was now appliable to meshes. After that, I created 1 big mesh that covers the entire map.

After some tweaking and finding a way to make it perform well, I started working on the next requirement, which is clearing the fog.

Clearing the fog and creating playable areas was actually quite easy, I designed how the fog of war should work with the help of my colleague who was the lead programmer for Polder.

I quickly took notice of a method called "DistanceToNearestSurface" which allows for any point in the global volume to be sampled and altered.
Then, after adding a little math to the material, I was able to create and invisible mesh that clears the fog only on that specific mesh.

The best thing about this method was that it's simple to use, apply (with any mesh), and it's flexible, since the area of effect changes with the size of this mesh in-game.

Here is an early version showcasing the effect

This is the final version of the fog of war system, more performant and faster.

After this was all finished, I applied this hexagon mesh with the transparent material and added it to the blueprint of the church, as the church is supposed to grant vision to the map.

I then made some small code that allowed this hexagon to change between 3 different sizes, so that it would be easy to "upgrade" the church and expand the vision.

My roles

During this project my roles were:

Tools used