I’ve done some graphical updates for these videos, so it’s more visually appealing to play, better fits the style of the game, and to help the player view things with less obstruction.

The Environment: Ugly motel carpeting! I didn’t make this, it was a free texture from GameTextures.com 😛 I will probably replace it with my own in the future….but I do really like it haha! I also added a shader to the environment models so they have a “line art” effect to keep in context with the comic book-esque/cartoon feel. If you notice the corkboard on the wall in the lobby: that’s my first skinned and hand-made object I’ve done with ProBuilder! I modeled it out, skinned it, exported and painted the skin in Clip Studio Paint (my standard art program) and imported the result back into Unity. The papers on there will be updated eventually to have actual content but I wanted to get some UV editing practice in. It’s pretty fun actually!

The Roof: I sliced the roof up into multiple pieces, so there is a segment of roof for each room. These now react dynamically depending on where player is; they disappear and reappear on room entry/exit. I liked this A LOT better than a single roof piece, so you can’t see what’s inside other rooms before you get there. Again, I could have used a darkness mask but I like the detail and potential of the roofing system better.

My apologies for how jumpy/laggy this video seems to be; every now and then Streamlabs does not like recording Unity and it makes the game look like it runs terribly but it’s only the recording.

The Outlines: For this little effect I grabbed the Easy Performant Outline asset, which is super easy to set up and gives wonderful results! I added this for a few reasons, one being that I don’t like when you can’t tell your main player is behind something or can’t see them at all. Since I have a rotating camera this wasn’t a TERRIBLE deal, except for things like overhangs. So I wanted to remedy that. I also wanted to add it to help with the Perception abilities; at a certain level, I felt you should be able to use Perception to, for a short time, outline some enemies or items (I had already experimented with this before, if you remember). I had a system to outline item models but sprites were a bit of a different story so I’m not sure it would have worked for enemies. EPO, however, supports sprites so it works out well with the characters, as you can see!

The Walls: Along the lines of the same issue, some rooms were REALLY hard to see into despite the camera rotation, and while you could see your player fine with the outline, it was really hard to investigate the rooms in any detail. So I made a partially transparent material to apply only to the outside wall, and upon entry of the room, the standard opaque material changes to the transparent one, allowing you to see inside the room! You should notice also that from the inside of the room, the wall is still opaque, so you can’t use the transparent wall trick to see the full environment outside.

The roof update video was recorded on January 24, 2021, and the outline/transparent wall update was recorded on April 24, 2021.