A Whole New Look

This update is all about aesthetics. I've been working on the visual style and some of the audio for the game. There's still more work to do on this front, but I think there's enough to warrant an update.

Most obviously, I've switched from the "Standard"  Unity shaders to a custom Toon Shader. I'm hoping this will make the game a little more friendly and approachable for those who might be unsure about spiders. I experimented with doing outlines in the shaders of each object, but decided I like the way the outlines looked in post-processing better. Since I was already experimenting with post-processing, I played with some other effects, and found that I really liked Ambient Occlusion. 

I wanted to make the "Hunting Mode" visually different from the "regular/movement" mode, to make it a little more obvious that controls/context was different. I played with a few ideas, but ultimately went with a making everything grayscale, except the prey insects stay colored to draw attention to them. I'm pretty happy with how this looks, and the transition between the two modes is also smooth. I also wrote my own line renderer for the jump line, because the built-in one had a weird distortion going on that I couldn't get rid of.

After spending a lot of time fighting with real-time lights and shadows, I started looking for alternatives. See, my insects need to cast shadows in the direction of whatever surface they happen to be on (floor, wall, ceiling, etc) for a nice look. You can't get that with a directional light, nor with any of the other standard lighting options. Unity doesn't have a built-in way to make a shadow renderer not based on lights, so I had to make my own. It basically uses a camera that draws just one bug from "above" it's back. Then we grayscale that image, and project it onto the ground as a decal. It's still needs some tuning, but I'm liking the way it works and looks. 

I also started working with some sound effects. Audio is one of my weakest areas in game design, and it doesn't help that Unity's audio system is kinda all over the place. The documentation is often unclear about how things work, and it's been a bit frustrating to figure out "good" (from both programming and performance) ways of doing things. There's also the challenge of just making good sounding audio, from knowing what "good" might sound like as well and recording and editing sound effects. There is, obviously, still a lot of work to do here, but I think I've at least got a decent technical solution worked out.