Unity as a tool: Our first game build

After a few days of coding tutorials and Unity usage, our team has managed to produce our first working game build with a fully functioning dimension swap game mechanic.

As seen in the video above, the player control is set in first person with stepping sound effects, head bobbing, and shift sprinting. This first person component is a pre-existing prefab that comes with the standard assets package that comes with unity. Though, I have edited it to some extent in terms of speed, jump height, and player camera effects.

Speaking of effects, I initially planned to use a fantastic camera shader called Post Processing Stacks. The plugin would have allowed the display visuals to have ambient occlusion, motion blur, and depth of field among other things. But due to unforeseen unity version conversion and technical glitches beyond my control, the plugin broke and was unable to do anything useful. I may find a solution in the future, but for now, I’m using the effect assets that come with Unity, which provide a few of the same benefits, but with a less intuitive UI.

The biggest challenge thus far has been trying to create two sets of lighting, skybox, and colour correction which accurately depict the two art styles of the of the two dimensions in the game. The skybox has a lot of control over the atmosphere glow, a correct use of lighting can set a specific mood with its warmth and intensity, and the colour correction gives additional tonal control with its control over saturation and RGB levels. Combining these three elements carefully to achieve the art style of Dima Rebus is proving to be a challenge, but I believe that it can be done with extra testing and selecting some different skyboxes.

The most prominent feature in this build is the mechanic where when the player presses the “E” key, a number of objects disappear with new objects in their place, the lighting changes, and the skybox changes. When pressed multiple times, the environment alternates between the two sets of in-game components, one set where the lighting is bright and warm with high saturation, and one where the lighting is slightly dim with colder lighting. These alternating components are meant to emulate the sense of dimension travel, as if the player is still in the exact same space, but in the different world.

Once I’ve finalized the lighting of the two dimensions, I will go about looking into level design, and utilize some assets I was able to find.