episode 3

Ah game jams... it's always something isn't it ? Evidently my body/brain aren't suuuper interested in being awake this week so getting large amounts of work done has been hard.

Today I cleaned up the physics a little in my test area. I also got the player lighting working so it glows more the more light energy (life) it has left.

I ended up spending more time than I expected on the flipbook shader for my sprites because apparently getting a URP sprite shader to play nicely with lighting is a pain in the butt if you don't know what you're doing. Thankfully Amplify had a couple of videos on custom surface shader lighting and I was able to pull enough info out of those to translate it to a sprite shader. Now I have sexy, flickering flipbook sprites that react to lighting.

The flipbook art is all AI generated based on prompts relevant to the game theme, I simply took them into photoshop and masked out a circle around them, then organised them into a sprite sheet which I used in Unity with a flipbook shader to animate them. The shader adds a little pseudo-random noise and size flickering and you have a nice abstract sprite.