Alan Liu
Pop Buddies!
Card Shop Simulator
Introduction
Pop Buddies! Card Shop Simulator is a student project made in 4 weeks in November 2024. The game is a card shop simulation game developed for mobile platforms. In this game, players can manage their card shop and they need to find and catch Yokai in order to turn them into cards. With more cards players get, they can sell them to upgrade their shops and optimize the city.
In this game, I worked as a technical artist focused on the effects of trading cards and the gallery to show them. There are several materials and shaders applied on different parts of the cards. I took charge on making all these different shaders including shining, reflection, and eye range effects.
Material & Shader
An example of viewing one card from gallery
I made 4 materials for different parts of the cards: outline, backside, illustration, and illustration background. Although there are some effects that are used in all of them, I decided to make them in different material files so that our artist could have more controls on different parts of the cards.
In the illustration material, there is an eye range detection function so that i can know the angle between camera and the card so that it could apply on the shining and reflection sections. For these 2 sections, reflection applies a reflection color on the base texture, and the shining section adds a shining color then shifts it starting from the camera facing position.
Also the illustration material uses depth maps to simulate the depth of field effect. And the offset section would move the card's vertex based on the camera position.
The other 3 materials use similar functions and add a fresnel on it. The back and front of the card also has a pattern texture that shines based on the camera position.
Gallery UI
I also made a simple widget UI of the gallery so that players can check their collection anytime.
