I saw the art from the Firewatch announcement website and thought it would be cool if I could get that kind of color scheme and have it change time of day.
So I made it. You can take a look here.
The whole scene uses only 2 textures and 3 shaders. There’s about a dozen materials in use, but that could be cut down with more time.
More about what’s going on behind the scenes after the fold.
I have some gripes about how Unity lets you apply image effects.
Notably, that you can’t apply image effects to only some layers.
The technical reason for this is that Unity’s Image Effects run on whichever screen buffer is returned by the camera to which the effect is attached. Each camera in the scene, depending on its clear flags, writes on top of what’s there. That means an image effect operates on everything that’s come before it.
We can’t change that. But we can route around it using render textures.
For my latest Virtual Environment project I decided to make something that was a bit more static-content-production heavy.
When I make games I tend to rely on procedural generation. I do that because I don’t have a ton of experience making static assets. I do programming. I do technical art. I do tools. But I’ve not really had a need to make assets.
So this project was about telling a short story through a space filled with static content.
The prompt I chose was a one-sentence short-story prompt. “You finally broke into the janitor’s closet, and you were right to be paranoid.”
You can play it here.
Our next assignment for the Virtual Environments class was just as open ended as the first. This time I decided to work around some issues I’ve had with Unity’s image effects.
I’ll write up how I do it later, but for now you can play it here.