Heyo! My name is Stephan and welcome to my site! I'm a game developer and specialize in tech art.
I really like pixel graphics and building virtual worlds that feel alive. I mainly work with Unity.

Feel free to contact me through my socials, or by email: starbi@proton.me

released games

technical artist • 2024 - 2025

projects

Pelixir

a custom 3D pixel art render pipeline for Unity

Empty Spaces

a pixel art illustration turned 3D using Pelixir

jam games

Git Ev

made in 3 days • rank 1 winner out of 400+ entries

Rabid-Rabbit Rice Cooker

made in 3 days • rank 1 presentation out of 90+ entries

Bimsness Rush

made in 9 days • rank 1 fun out of 200+ entries

2024 - 2025

Spilled!

A short game about cleaning up oil spills. It's cute and cozy. Lente initially wanted this to be a solo dev project, but I joined a year into development to increase visual appeal and improve performance.

accomplishments

  • A near complete overhaul of the graphics. Worked closely with Lente to improve visuals while keeping the original vision of the game's art style and mood intact.

  • Massive improvements to CPU time by minimizing game object count for oil, optimizing scripts, project settings, and converting some visual effects to run in a shader.

  • 94% out of 3000+ Steam reviews are positive. Negative reviews mostly refer to the game's short runtime.

  • Nominated by Golden Joystick Awards for "Best Indie Game - Self Published".

about my work

I was responsible for all things technical art, performance, and some environment art.

Before and after of my work on shaders, materials and environment art in two areas of the game.

Before and after of the water shader, and the conversion of the oil to a world texture. The floating bottle animation and pixel snapping all run in the vertex shader.

  • Integrated my 3D pixel art render pipeline - Pelixir - replacing URP. Every material and shader was updated.

  • Wrote a new water shader for the game. It's clear, accepts decals, has oil floating on it, and can change color per-area based on game state.

  • Reworked the oil spills to use a texture-based approach. Before, each unit of oil was a game object. This massively improved performance and also enabled new shader effects, like units of oil morphing together.

  • Created a procedural "scatter" detail system to generate and render thousands of small objects. This is similar to terrain details, but works on any mesh surface. It implements a chunk system, frustum culling, batching similar objects, and GPU instanced rendering.

  • Did an environment art pass on the later areas of the game. Made an eight layer terrain shader with procedural noise.

Custom editor tool to paint, remove oil, and define area boundaries.

Frustum culling on large amounts of small instanced details. All details of a type get rendered in one draw call.

credits

  • Lente for letting me work on her game. It was already bound for success by the time I joined. She trusted me when I had no previous professional experience in game development.

  • Prologi for the serene soundtrack and audio work.

  • Lente's Discord community for being so supportive. Playtesting, hyping up the game, reporting bugs... and just being fun place to hang around in!

more

Placing instance generators. Define generation settings and a prefab. All cylinder instances are chunked and rendered in one draw call.

Close-up of the water. The water goes from transparent to using blue color ramp. Materials can set how much they retain their color underwater. The result is very clear water, but with strong colors.

since 2022

Pelixir

A custom render pipeline, built on the Unity SRP core. The goal is to render 3D scenes in a way that imitates 2D pixel art illustrations. Pixel art charm but with all the possibilites of 3D rendering and level design. It's a package that can be installed just like URP. It comes with a set of shaders, tools and components that are all tuned for 3D pixel art.The name Pelixir comes from pel which is another word for pixel, and elixir refers to the elixir of life. The pixels come alive using 3D rendering tech!

about my work & features

I've been developing Pelixir on and off since 2022. It has been used in production for Spilled!.

  • A full Forward+ render pipeline built on render graph.

  • Pixel art HLSL shaders for Lit, Sprite, Water, Line, Decal, Skybox.

  • Instead of going for post-process color limitation, materials pick color sets from a global palette. This is to emulate how a pixel artist would pick colors from a limited palette.

  • Pixel snapping to eliminate jitter when panning camera and moving objects.

  • Subpixel render output offset in orthographic views for very smooth camera panning.

  • Smooth pixel upscaling for arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios while keeping pixels per unit consistent.

  • Custom pre-passes for depth, normals, segments, outlines, decals, and pixel perfect lines.

  • Custom decal system with special pre-pass buffer layout. Advanced blending by overriding pixel art material properties of target surface.

  • Perspective projection support with smooth blending from and to orthographic projection. All shaders and effects work with both modes.

  • Integrated with the Volume system from the SRP core.

  • Modifications to post-processing effects, like full resolution bloom, which reduces flicker at low resolutions.

  • Editor integrations. Custom inspectors for camera and lights. Pixelize scene views and material previews. Debug views.

Scene editing in Pelixir. Notice the pixelized scene view, custom light inspector options, and fog being adjusted with a volume override.

credits

  • Catlike Coding for the amazing tutorial series. Pelixir is based on the custom SRP tutorial.

  • t3ssel8r for the massive inspiration with their 3D pixel art. I got into technical art because of that art style.

more

Editing a decal and its material. Blending is configured per material. Some decals can blend with the brick lines and its color, others can override it, like a poster.

Smooth blend from orthographic to perspective projection.
This shot also did really well on Twitter. :^)

Grass and leaves are instanced billboards on top of the terrain and tree crowns.

Two characters submerged in water.

2023

Empty Spaces

A proof of concept for my 3D pixel art render pipeline - Pelixir.This is a remake of an original art piece of the same name by exceptional pixel artist waneella. The original was a 2D illustration. The final result is a 3D scene rendered in realtime inside the Unity Editor.Until I made this, I didn't test my pipeline on real concept art. I love waneella's work, so I tried to recreate it. During the process I implemented a lot of features that are still used in the render pipeline today.

about my work

My friend Gawi did the initial 3D blockout, camera setup, and audio. I did everything else. Shaders, lighting, materials, details, decals, textures. The composition is also a straight clone of the original artwork.Note: This is about everything that was added alongside this project. Not all of the render pipeline. Check out the Pelixir page for that.

  • Made a new decal system tuned for 3D pixel art. Includes a box projector, decal buffer pre-pass, and a lot of blending options.

  • Raymarched volumetric fog using directional light shadows and world height.

  • Segment edge detection to get pixel perfect lines on mesh surfaces. Segment values are stored inside the opaque pre-pass texture. Also, an option to generate indented normals along the line to make the tiled look happen that is often seen in waneella's work.

  • Pixel perfect line shader. It is a mesh with line topology. A pre-pass renders a rough line. Another pass clips excess corner pixels - also known as doubles - to create a perfect line.

credits

  • Gawi for the initial blockout, camera, audio, and particle setup. And for sticking with me through this.

  • waneella for giving me permission to use her original artwork for this project.

more

September 2025

Git Ev

A first-person exploration puzzle game, where you try to find your way home in an alien city. Learn the language and enjoy a walk at night. Inspired by Chants of Sennaar and Bernband. Made by three people in three days.

results

  • Rank 1 winner of 423 entries in Mağara Jam 25 - the most popular game jam in Turkey, hosted yearly.

about my work

I was responsible for shaders, environment design and crowd AI programming.

  • Custom stylized HLSL shader using URP. Posterized baked global illumination.

  • Kitbashing a small city in three days.

  • 200 NavMesh agents moving through the city with their own destinations and generated colors.

credits

  • HOLYPERSON for most gameplay programming and sprite work.

  • qupugu for all the audio.

March 2025

Rabid-Rabbit Rice Cooker

A wave defense game, where you have to merge rabbits to make better rabbits and have them fight for you. Made by three people in three days.

about my work

I was responsible for shaders, materials, VFX, and level design.

  • Made a stylized shader using Shader Graph in URP.

  • Sobel Edge Detection through a fullscreen post-process pass. Uses depth, normals and color.

  • Made all of the VFX using VFX Graph.

results

credits

  • HOLYPERSON for all the gameplay programming and the cute bunny model.

  • Erasmus for the audio and amazing name of the game.

2022

Bimsness Rush

A fast-paced shooter, where you can pickup and throw anything. Made by two people in nine days.

about my work

I was in charge for all of the visuals.

  • Custom stylized shaders with Sobel outlines. Uses URP's SimpleLit as a base.

  • Made all of the UI, 3D models, materials and VFX using VFX Graph.

results

credits

  • Gawi for the design, programming, and sound selection. And just generally being cool. 🦧

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