sgthale

MyRobot Development Part 48

Added 2025-02-19 02:10:01 +0000 UTC

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

Anime Lookdev
Workflow Optimizations
Grapple Hook Rework

Anime Lookdev

As you know, the game in the demo had realistic PBR materials with some flat changes. This looked very mediocre and I wanted to make sure that MyRobot looks good in its final form. So this week I spent reworking and creating shaders for the environment and models.

These shaders all have custom lighting, completely bypassing Unity's built in physically based rendering, to favor a more flat pseudo-cell-shaded look. There is a nice rim light to catch details at distances and an outline shader on all props so it's easier to tell what is part of the environment and what's dynamic.

Overall it looks very good. Still a few tweaks here and there but the look is 90% achieved. It's not an unlit look, much of the look actually relies on a screen space ambient occlusion shader to carve out details in the dark.

Workflow Optimizations

This decision was heavily weighted by the new anime art style but also it was a call for VR and workflow speed. You see, making traditional models; modeling, painting, etc. is time consuming and much of the time the more complicated a model, the harder it is to make it look good. So all the models from here on out are going to be much simpler in nature, shading and colors.

This also makes it great for VR.

Grapple Hook Rework

The grapple hook has reached its near final form. It will no longer reel in at the beginning of the game and its physics have been optimized. Now it will be used for swinging. Much later on you'll be able to upgrade it to receive the reel in feature.

This was done partly because it was too overpowered with map traversal. It was too easy to run up a cliff by just spamming reel in. I do want the player to reach that level of mobility but not so fast at the beginning!

I'm pushing out a patch tonight to address some more Patreon login fixes. It seems it was solved 60% but a few are still unable to connect.

Stay tuned!