Devlog #1 - Artstyles!

The last month I’ve been playing around a lot with the look and feel of the game. I want it to be a warm and cozy environment, but I also want it to be vibrant and unique. Early on in development I opted to go for an outline shader for anything aside from the foliage, which allows me to get away with unlit materials. The main reason for this is that I like modeling, but hate unwrapping and texturing. I’m truly bad at them and they take me a lot of time.

I figured, if I could skip that step altogether I would save a lot of time and frustration. Instead, I developed a custom unlit shader that blends the color of each pixel between two pre-set color, based on the distance away from the camera. This means you effectively create a multi-color fog-like effect. Early on in development I used the built-in fog effect from Unity but I opted to not use that as to have more control over the final look of the game. Here’s an example of this material in action:

I really like how it turned out and with the proper colors, it creates a dream-like atmosphere which is what I was looking for for my mysterious forest.

I also setup a scriptable object with a custom inspector where I could setup different configurations for the artstyle quickly and play around with different looks. This is what that looked like:

This way it became a really fun process figuring out what colors I could use, instead of having to manually adjust a bunch of materials and shader settings every time. I could just adjust colors, press the button, and see my results in the scene!

I came up with a load of different styles, ranging from extremely ugly, to experimental, to pretty. I tried to go for semi-monochromatic color palettes because I felt that worked well with the simple line-look I was going for. Here are a couple of configurations I liked:

I also went on to experiment with styles that were a bit crazier just to see how they looked: 

All in all, I had fun with this feature! And it’ll help me dial in the exact feeling I want to create. I still feel like the artstyle is missing - something - ? So over time I might experiment some more!