Devlog #2 - ART Research/Prototyping

Second week of preproduction/research phase is over so let us show you what we’ve been up to over the past few days.

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Our main topic this time was graphics and how to achieve the style we have in our heads. Because we are using unity, which is for all of our artists new, we started researching how to do certain things.

From researching how to create transparent/masked materials for foliage to creating interactable snow etc.. but we will talk about all of them in a minute.

Firstly foliage and the actual style of it:

Our assets should have gradient from top to bottom, where top is lighter and bottom is darker… In this example the gradient is not present and will be added with shader, however the style of the tree is there. Silhouette and overall shape tweaks are something we will leave for the polish phase, our focus right now is to figure out how to do it and what is the most efficient way of achieving our desired visuals in the shortest time possible.

Snow Shaders:

We are going to have two types of snow shaders, first one is interactable snow that deforms under the player and objects (Basically trails that player and objects leave when moving through snow)

We also looked into basic material creation and tried to do some basic snow texture that might be used on the interactable snow.

 Other shader for snow is going to be used on assets that are covered in snow. With shader we can create simple illusion of snow piling on top of these assets with simple vertex position offsetting and some math.

The problem with that is we can’t use it on assets that have smaller count of vertices, for example trees and vegetation in general, those are created with small amount of vertices so this shader of displacing vertices is not viable option, so we will create separated mesh for the snow that is going to be placed on top of it.

When someone says snow we probably all imagine some snow falling from sky. That’s also what we looked into, particles:

Particles are pretty similar to the particle system in Unreal engine 4. Again this is not final version, it’s super basic prototype that is supposed to help us to see what the problems might be and how we should approach this topic.

Another topic we looked into is Lightning in unity:

After some research we came to conclusion that most of the lights are going to be dynamic. Because we are not going with super high end graphics, we can take that extra power we safe and we can use it to save us some more time by not doing light baking. We are also going for some lightning dynamic changes throughout the gameplay, so dynamic lights seems like the best and fastest option for us. Also some emissive materials might be used as lights.

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When it comes to gameplay mechanics in prototype we added:

• Basic health system to the player and enemies
• Enemies can now attack the player
• Enemies are also now spawning on the edges of the map
• When the snoball gets to certain size it deals aoe demage
• Also support for keyboard and mouse
• And basic score system

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Upcoming week:

We need to prepare for our production, which means we will try to find the best and most optimised ways to create our assets, code, scripts, shaders and many many more thing we will need. Basically we need to polish our pipeline and workflow to not stutter when we switch into production.

But that's it for now, have a nice week,

bye!