An Ant’s Adventure

Cel Shading & Edge Detection

The game An Ant’s Adventure is a third person puzzle game involves exploring the environment in an ant’s perspective to rescue the Queen’s egg. As part of a school game project, I was task to bring the game world to life fitting our cartoonish theme.

Cel shading and edge detection are implemented to give life to the game. Edge detection technique employed are edge detection using Sobel Operator and Object Layer based Outlining to determine which provides a better feel to the game. Object Layer based Outlining prove to be more suitable visually and performance wise.

No Filter

We prepare a scene with no filter. The game world is made up of boxes and some ants characters. Without filter, the game world looks dull, static and unattractive.

Sobel Operator

Sobel operator, which sometimes called the sobel filter, is use within edge detection algorithm to emphasize edges. After applying the filter, the edges are outlined with black lines. However we can see some obvious flaw with sobel operator on our game scene. Some boxes that are connected side by side will not have the edge outline between them. There are certain connected boxes with a faint hint of outline, but they look poor and out of place.

Object Layer based Outlining

Object Layer based Outlining produces a better aesthetic over sobel operator. Edge are highlighted per object which gives a very solid feel. Outline are clearly define with no dotted borders.

Lim Yee Chen
Team Lead

Development Team Lead with experience in Golang & DevOps