This last week I have focused on lightning and shader effects for the game, all lightning have been redone and all shaders have been reworked and improved. The reason that I redid all of this was both to improve preformance but also to allow us to be more flexible and make it easier for us to add and change the effects and shaders that we are using.
I also started to implement shaderforge shaders to the game, spent a day or two learning the software and then moving on to beginning shaders like the invisibility effect and effects for weapons.
When I changed the lightning I started by changing the basic color settings and render settings to improve the performance of the game. After that I swapped all of the shaders out to the new unity shader tool, to help keep everything in order and up to date.
After this was done I changed to directional lights and the ambient lightning in the level, after playing around with these settings for a while I was satisfied enough to continue working on the effects and color corrections. This is where things started taking time, I sat with the shaders and the camera effects for almost half the week trying to get them all to look good together and after doing a ton of iterations I managed to complete something that did not look to grey and boring but at the same time did not look so extremely colorful and burned your eyes.
Before
First iteration (too grey and none colorful)
Final lightning
While there are still some areas that need improvement, like the crystals that shine too much it overall have more of an alien feeling to it and most important the neon effect on weapons and crafting table actually works good.
fnabbeblog 