Lantern
Overview
Lantern is a project I started with my wife to make a 2D side scrolling multiplayer adventure. The goal is to create a visually stunning story driven experience that has the players work together to solve various puzzles along the way. Art right now is completely placeholder just so core game mechanics can be properly developed both mechanically and visually. I have been excited to work on multiplayer games and strengthen my networking skills. This game will have a focus on 2 player coop which should make some of the networking easier as I won't have to worry about hit detection and checking for cheating like I would in a PvP scenario.
Lantern is a project I started with my wife to make a 2D side scrolling multiplayer adventure. The goal is to create a visually stunning story driven experience that has the players work together to solve various puzzles along the way. Art right now is completely placeholder just so core game mechanics can be properly developed both mechanically and visually. I have been excited to work on multiplayer games and strengthen my networking skills. This game will have a focus on 2 player coop which should make some of the networking easier as I won't have to worry about hit detection and checking for cheating like I would in a PvP scenario.
Multiplayer
I got the multiplayer working very basically using PUN2. I have a simple room system that allows people to make rooms and join existing rooms. This will have to be fleshed out more with private rooms and chat, but it works in the meantime to test two players joining and playing a game together.
I got the multiplayer working very basically using PUN2. I have a simple room system that allows people to make rooms and join existing rooms. This will have to be fleshed out more with private rooms and chat, but it works in the meantime to test two players joining and playing a game together.
Custom Shaders
Spent some time making a custom shader for our lantern effect. The lantern lights will show everything in full color and the rest of the game will be rendered in gray scale. I also took the time to investigate Unity's Shader Graph to see what it can do and how powerful it is compared to the efficiency of the generated shader code. I am by no means an expert in shaders in Unity, but I have dabbled with making my own adjustments to existing shaders before.
Spent some time making a custom shader for our lantern effect. The lantern lights will show everything in full color and the rest of the game will be rendered in gray scale. I also took the time to investigate Unity's Shader Graph to see what it can do and how powerful it is compared to the efficiency of the generated shader code. I am by no means an expert in shaders in Unity, but I have dabbled with making my own adjustments to existing shaders before.
Reflections
We wanted to have some places where the players walked next to water and we thought reflections would add to the ambience of the game. After thinking about it for a bit I decided to use a second camera with a render texture as I wanted to be able to properly capture all of the effects happening from the shaders on the player to the player's reflection. I think it turned out good, but it is a bit expensive to have another camera in the scene. Luckily I should be able to limit it to just one extra as I move the reflection where it is needed.
We wanted to have some places where the players walked next to water and we thought reflections would add to the ambience of the game. After thinking about it for a bit I decided to use a second camera with a render texture as I wanted to be able to properly capture all of the effects happening from the shaders on the player to the player's reflection. I think it turned out good, but it is a bit expensive to have another camera in the scene. Luckily I should be able to limit it to just one extra as I move the reflection where it is needed.
Parallax
To add more to the ambience I added parallax to the background which made it come alive. Nothing super special here just a basic layered background being moved at different rates to create the depth. In addition I have the texture repeat itself for as long as the level allows the player to move in either direction by jumping to the correct coordinates as the player moves too far to one side or the other.
To add more to the ambience I added parallax to the background which made it come alive. Nothing super special here just a basic layered background being moved at different rates to create the depth. In addition I have the texture repeat itself for as long as the level allows the player to move in either direction by jumping to the correct coordinates as the player moves too far to one side or the other.