During this week of development, I made a lot of improvements to the first-level underground bunker scene, the first of which was adding lighting to the scene which I did using Unity's experimental 2D lighting renderer. To get this to work I had to go to the packages section of the unity engine and add the Universal render pipeline package to the project within which is a 2D lighting section that is listed as 2D (Experimental). However, when I added the lights originally they did not affect the items within the scene and after some digging it turns out this is because all of the assets within the scene had the Lit material on them meaning that they were lit by default. To ensure that the lights within the scene worked I had to change all the assets within the scene to use an Unlit material so that the lighting can affect them. Thankfully unity has a way to upgrade all of the materials in the scene added before the URP package was added (because new assets are unlit by default) to the URP so they became unlit all at once.
However, doing this meant that all of the tiles that I spent time creating that were outside of the range of the light were not visible meaning that the player could not see them and after having spent time creating these tiles I thought it a waste for the player to not see the majority of them. To fix this I added a Global light and dimmed it down so that it slightly lights up the background and foreground assets not affected by the point lights. (the image above shows what the scene looked like at this stage) Then later this week since I made the lighting work within the scene I decided to make all the remaining background assets for the bunker (some examples are shown below.)
These assets above are all mostly assets that will not be interacted with in any way and are in the game to create the scenery of the vault, apart from however the notice board as that is going to become one of the interactable lore pieces that the player can read and/or listen to during gameplay.
The video above shows what they look like within the scene as well as how they interact with the lighting I also added this week. Lastly, to end this week I started to create some initial design ideas for the main character “Donald” and the mother NPC character I did this using the Prototype Hero template I downloaded from the Unity store as I extracted the sprite sheet that contained the blank person shape and put it into Microsoft Paint and used the pencil tool to change the color of the pixels to make my character following the body shape of the Prototype Hero Template.
Since Donald is a Non-Binary Character who uses They/Them Pronouns I tried my best through the limited space of a few pixels to make them look as Gender Neutral as possible, I did this by getting rid of traits that are generally seen as too masculine or too feminine for example I gave Donald short hair as long hair is generally seen as a feminine trait, they also have very gender neutral clothing in the way of having a hoodie and trousers be their clothing instead of possible a more feminine or masculine clothing set like a dress or a suit. And whilst I am aware that Non-Binary individuals can wear suits and dresses and have long or short hair as still be a Gender Non conforming person I designed Donald this way to show instead of tell the player about Donald's gender identity.
During this week of development for Kessler, I made improvements to the lighting of the first level underground bunker scene using Unity's experimental 2D lighting renderer. To get the lights to work, all assets within the scene had to be changed to use an Unlit material. A Global light was added to light up the background and foreground assets not affected by the point lights. I also created remaining background assets for the bunker, including an interactable notice board. Initial design ideas for the main character, Donald, and the mother NPC character were also created using a Prototype Hero template.