Going into this project I’ve messed around on unity before, mostly working in 2D trying to make really simple platform games so this is a big jump up from that.
The idea behind this is to try recreate some dreams I have been having recently. For about a month I was on some new medication (antidepressants, Fluroxitine) that have a number of really interesting side affects. For me one of these were these incredibly lucid dreams that all had a theme in common. Everything was on fire. The castle at work, the shed at home, the whole of Glasgow. Things kept burning and I tried to put them out but couldnt. Scale was off, logic was out the window, these dreams were bizzare vivid and uncontrollable.
I really want to try recreate this within Unity.
Graphically I didn’t want things to look photo realistic, since it was from my dreams I wanted there to be juxtaposition within the scene using different styles that would throw off the user. But I was mostly inspired to make the scene look alot like my favourite game growing up, Star wars Battlefront 2 which I played on the PS2 split screen with my brothers.
In the images above I’ve made sure to include scenes with fire to show the sort of crappy aesthetic I am looking for.
Fire in video games is a very unique graphic that people deal with very differently, alot of the time it looks pretty terrible…
Such as Jumper: Griffins story, 2008. Although fire isnt the only thing they needed to work on.
However some games manage to handle fire brilliantly…. of course a much newer release.
Red Dead redemption 2, 2018.
So since fire is such an important theme in my scene I decided to go with the crappy aesthetic, one because it was reminiscent of Starwars Battlefront 2 but also because it would be much easier to work on….
Starting Development
I’ve messed around in unity before, but only in 2d. Making platform like game(s) in high school. So moving to 3D was a change, I personally am not great working in 3D environments, I just find it very unintuitive. However I think I got to grips with unity far quicker then most other 3D environments that I’ve worked in before.
I started out making my terrain, since this is based back home wanted to go for a grassy lowland aesthetic, rolling hills and lots of trees.
This was actually far easier to do than i expected especially with the paint trees and texture tool. As I developed further I continuously went back and adjusted the terrain, trees and texture. So at first I wasn’t fussed about it being perfect.
Next I wanted to work out how to make fire….
I went about this using a VFX Graph, which is a nodal system, something I’ve not really worked with before. It took alot of trial and error and even more frustration over render pipelines however eventually I something resembling terrible fire…
Now I needed to add more to the scene, so I started with the sheds and the car. Here I wanted to create a real juxtaposition of graphic styles just to throw of the user.
You can tell I was having trouble with the render pipeline…
No I wanted to add some scripting to trigger the shed going on fire and the car to roll back and also set on fire. I did this with the player proximity to the game objects that then activated the affects.
Now when you approach the Gameobjects they start the VFX and car animation rolling backwards.
LEARNING JOURNAL 