Updates for this month:
- Level design (Eastern Forest, test island)
- Grass!
- Shaders: Halftone
- Lighting
- Textures
- New mechanics: laser chasing, fish catching
- Massive memory crashes
This month was largely spent tackling the challenge of level design and the limits of the mobile platform. First and foremost, since I had gotten saving working the month before, it was time to start working on saving and loading between levels/ areas. This also meant I had to start actually level designing. I created a night island to practice and then started working on the Eastern Forest, which will be one of the areas explorable in the final game. Because I am picky, even during prototyping, I was unsatisfied with all the tree models I had and also had to model a new tree type.
In the Eastern Forest, I also finally got grass auto generating, thanks to a tool created by Minions Art. I had attempted grass a couple months back as getting it working was important to how I wanted the game to look. But, at the same time, grass can be very computationally expensive (particularly for mobile) and hard to get looking nice. The grass currently working is actually a graphic shader, not a physical model, and therefore should be more light weight.
Also attempted previously, I finally got a halftone shader working that gives shadows a halftone effect, similar to traditional manga. Unfortunately, using the shader does not allow me to bake the lighting (a way to save non-changing shadows so they do not need to be computed in real-time, therefore also saving memory) which does end up being very memory consumptive, however I very much like the effect it gives. I will just have to save memory elsewhere instead! That being said, before I got the halftone effect working, I had also worked on baking lighting this month. But I am not skilled in that area, as it is new to me, and the outcomes were not very good looking. Luckily the halftone effect ended up working and I should not have to be using baked lighting (even though it would probably be beneficial).
Texture color pallets were tested, as well as figuring out how to add paths to the terrain (not shown). Misu is also the appropriate color now!
Two new mechanics were added: chasing the ever elusive red dot (inspired by Genshin Impact’s Seelie mechanic), and simple ‘fishing’. Legend tells, that if you chase the red dot, it will bring you to treasure! Though beware, it is elusive and cannot be caught, no matter how hard you try nor how fast you run! The fishing is more of a time based mini game, where you have to tap the fish (to catch it) as it jumps out of the water.
The Red Dot (aka laser pointer)
Fishing
Lastly, this update is coming a bit late due to the fact that… the game had a massive memory crash which pushed back work for about a week! I do not know the cause, nor did I necessarily fix it, I simply re-implemented the features lost prior to the crash on a previous version. And although everything is basically back to normal, the game is no longer crashing. Unity do be like that sometimes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I will be making sure to focus more on memory usage in the future now!
**Models, animations, and sounds are not final**