New Art Assets

This week I purchased some assets from the Unity asset store to try and liven up my game with some models and art. This low poly cyberpunk city asset was very close to the style I wanted to achieve in synthicate and allow me a lot of flexibility with editing the models, textures and materials. Some examples of my new city designs using this asset package are show below.

From this I've learning that I'm not too into level design. It is a little tedious and I'd rather work on other things like adding effects and functionality. Maybe in the future I should try sketching out my ideas for the level design first and then use those sketches to guide my implementation.

Shader Experiments

This week I also started learning more about shaders. Originally I wanted to achieve an outline effect to make some neon highlights around several of the buildings. Afterwards, I soon discovered some holographic shaders and decided that I wanted to use them to add additional effects to the game board. 

One particular effect that I became very interested in implementing was this holographic banner idea I found on Art Station.

This type of banner seems quintessential to cyberpunk themed environments. I used the knowledge that I learned in the initial holographic shader graph video to create my own custom shader with some textures that I designed in Affinity photo. 

My first iteration added the scrolling red lines for the background. 

My second added the scrolling danger symbols. 

The final iteration added the text.

After implementing all three of these as independent textures, I then went on to try to combine them in one joint shader. In this shader I would use information from the textures to control the emission, color, and alpha values of the shader. The final shader resulted in this awesome effect!