I refined my personal post processing effects library during this project, which are all combined in a single pass fragment shader. Only using the depth buffer to create Depth of Field (DoF) and Ambient Occlusion (AO). Since this game was for the holidays, I decided to have the lens shutter for the DoF effect shaped like a 5 point star.

Next to this post process pass, I also did a single screen-space render pass with just the christmas ornaments as stencil masks using their solid colors. Then for each ornament material I wrote a custom shader that uses this rendered buffer to simulate reflections from surrounding objects using the surface normal as the direction the reflection is coming from. This worked surprisingly well without any complicated triangulation math. I used the same technique to create the reflection of the ornaments on the floor, by offsetting the screen space UV based on the angle of the floor plane.

When everyone started to get really competitive, the request for a centralized high score board came soon after. I said that properly setting up a server to handle high scores is a lot of work, especially when it comes to security to prevent cheating. So initially I declined the ask. But after days of "relentless asking" from different people, I caved and gave it a shot.

I still had some rudimentary server side gameplay validation code somewhere. This code was rather simple and made for a game that had limited variables in gameplay. For this type of game I had to add a lot more checks and rules. Most of these rules needed some sort of flexibility percentage built in to account for edge cases. We did a lot of testing to find the right tolerances and overlap between rules to create a solid validation system that was hard to manipulate.