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Renderer for Kaiko Project 5

Jan Enders / May 2025

In my three years at KAIKO, I worked on “Project 5”, a top-down action adventure from a beloved THQNordic IP that sadly did not make it to release. The game was built entirely on in-house technology, and the main part of my work was building the render in a small two-person team together with Senior Programmer Florian Eisele.

Being such a small team, I got to work on many different parts of the renderer, which was a great learning experience.

The renderer features that I worked on include:

Forward plus rendering architecture with compute shader-based light culling
Implementating our own set of PBR shaders based on a metalness/roughness workflow
Image-based lighting with environment maps for specular and irradiance maps for diffuse
A number of special-purpose shaders like water, foliage, refractives, ghosts etc.
Specular Anti-aliasing
Decals
Height Fog
Terrain shader with heightmap-based blending between materials and soft intersections with other geometry
A variety of Post FX, including Atmospheric Scattering, Depth of Field, Color Grading and Automatic Exposure
Implementing a custom Tonemapper with an adjustable curve
Prototype Implementation of Light Propagation Volumes

PBR shader

Foliage shader

Terrain shader

Dissolving ghost shader

Depth of field

I also implemented some tool functionality to integrate with our renderer, such as:

Filtering HDR cubemaps into irradiance maps
Automatic merging of material textures based on semantic flags
Integrating newer block compression formats (BC 4 - 7) into our texture conversion pipeline

Our codebase includes a platform abstraction layer, which I also contributed to by implementing support for compute shaders, ReadWriteBuffers, and ReadWriteTextures. In terms of APIs/Backends, I mostly interacted with Vulkan for PC and the NVN Library for Nintendo Switch.