Before jumping straight to production, I’d like to talk more about the ideas behind our art direction.
During one of the brainstorm session, I pitched the idea of having the environment to look like cutout paper card, where we can have several layers to give us some sort of parallax effect. Based of other 2D games I’ve tried, we usually have the asset separated into different section/layers anyway, so I was curious if this can be done.
Another idea I pitched was instead of having colored art assets, maybe we can use shader, lighting, and post-processing to color the game. This way, we can make the texture in grey scale, then modify things in game. I used similar method for some of Undead Darling’s art assets in the past where the texture was grey scale, and I would change the color of the material using Unity built-in material’s color swatch.
On the same night I proposed this, Alex came up with his shader scripts that colored things based of depth position (Z axis).
Here is the same script applied to placeholder art I made for the flipbook puzzle pitch from earlier (see previous post).
Although we did not go with the flip book design, I asked him to keep this script, and maybe added an option for us to be able to control the gradient manually too. He did just that by the next day.
Next, we will start talk about the process for creating each train car. Thank you for reading!
