Weekly Wisby 10: A little less community and a little more Unity

After 5 days we’ve got 6 people who joined the discord. That aren’t talking to each other. Or interacting in any way whatsoever. The takeaway: we’re right on track for the 30-users mark!

But boy there’s a real art to this community-stuff. I’m constantly questioning what I can and can’t write about the project, if I’m promoting the game to the right people (or am even allowed to), and if anyone even cares! Luckily I met some indie-fella last week whom I asked for guidance. He explained to me that, yes: you should post everything, and you should save everything you post so you can make callbacks to it later. They also told me to plaster my discord invites on any wall in every place, so that’s what I’m doin’.

Last week I complained about lights for half of the post. This week is a lot more relaxed. I went through the rest of the course and finished it splendidly. There’s 3 main steps to lighting optimizing, which can be completed in any order (though they really should have started with their last step.)

1 step I already talked to you about last week: create light cages that fake the lighting for small objects. Next, you need to think about the LARGE objects! Objects that you want to bake lighting for are given what’s called a lightmap. A lightmap is liiiiike… a set of images that capture the light… look it’s hard to explain. What’s important is that less lightmaps is faster.


Different colors represent different lightmaps. This has a lot of them.

This one has a lot less and looks much cleaner by comparison.

The last part is to fine-tune your lightmap parameters. There’s not much to tell; I mean the details are very technical, but essentially it comes down to “lower the resolution”.

These mountains have a resolution of 1. You almost can’t even see the grid pattern on them.

These have a resolution of 0.05, meaning it has 40x less squares to think about.

After my 3-day pilgrimage to learn all of this, I decided it would be best that the lighting process was placed on my shoulders. Sophie has enough to worry about with creating the art for the game, and I think Unity has done a pretty swell job at separating the 2 pipelines.

Clouds are great for atmosphere! As such, I was tasked with finding an agreeable solution for clouds in Unity. True, I was the one who assigned that task to myself… because I wanted to dive into Unity more… but this is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Looking through a few existing cloud solutions, I found one I was happy with in Unity’s very own Boat Attack. This was great, because it meant we could use it for free!


Clouds in Boat Attack.

These clouds were smartly optimized, realistic and were affected by light! I added my own little touch to also have them interact with fog. This way we didn’t have to worry about them blending with the background too much. Here’s my first results!


Clouds affected by light.

Clouds affected by fog.

After such a great week, my Friday was miserably pathetic by comparison. Following my success with clouds, I wanted to add “Celestial Cycles” as well… you know, rotating of the sun and moon around the Earth. 5 hours I spent on figuring out some stupid freakin’ rotation-problem! All I wanted was the sun to stay aligned, but whatever I tried it would jitter all over the place! After THAT miserable failure I spent another 5 hours, not on rotational issues, but on binge watching the entire first season of The Legend of Korra in one go. While eating ice cream. In my underwear. Crying. At least she defeated the evil Amon.