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.
A while back I gave an interview with Gaint Bomb’s Patrick Klepek on Video Game Foliage. Today the article it led to finally went up!
And then Destructoid covered the Giant Bomb coverage!
I’m excited that the blog is getting this kind of attention, and almost all of it seems positive. When I started the blog I didn’t know if people would like it. Seeing that people do resonate with it is really cool!