Periscope

An art driven original title, inspired by Telescope EP

Persicope is my last personal project made in Unity. The focus has been on art and design, which I've been trying to learn more about. As such, all of the assets in the game were made by me in Blender, textured in GIMP, with animations being made in both Blender and Unity. The narrative hook of the game is simple, collect enough money to see through the Periscope and see the sunset before it's over. There's no time limit in the game however. The ambience is in part inspired by lofi album art and the lofi genre more broadly. Therefore I've chosen to make the gameplay more casual in order to reinforce that lofi chilled out feeling.

Read on if you'd like to see more of the technical implementations being showcased. To see the scripts that support this game, have a look at this repository: https://github.com/Cublovatts/Periscope

Try a WebGL test build at: https://cublovatts.itch.io/periscope

NPC Routing

The NPC routing system was designed to be robust and easy to customise within the Unity UI. Destinations are simply GameObjects, so designers can place down a new object to represent a new destination and add it to an NPCs route. It's also easy to specify whether a destination is a warp destination. A tickbox decides whether an NPC will warp to that next destination or walk to it like others. This makes it easy to create NPCs that will repeatedly walk a route, without any extra features.

Visual Experimentation

It's taken some experimentation to try and attain the desired aesthetic, using different shaders, textures and lighting to try and bring it all together. There is still more work to do in this area. I've been using Unitys mixed lighting to enhance overall performance, baking lights in static areas and using realtime lights on objects like the train. During development I've turned down the baked resolution to improve bake times, but will increase this for production builds.

Animation

The more complex animations have been done in Blender and exported with models/rigs, while more simple animations have been completed in Unity. This includes UI animations, or objects like the train. Implementing inverse kinematics on the character models made animating them much easier and more natural looking.