For the second post I want to talk about something I probably shouldn't talk about, because little details are best left alone for the players to discover. However I think it's the one thing I enjoyed doing the most. So I do want to talk about the time I spent on mixing animations, tweaking shaders and fine-tuning sound effects. Some of you might call this immersion.

I started off with making a GameBoy prop in Blender, which I wanted to make the gap between the 3D and 2D worlds a bit more tangible (if that makes sense for a virtual game). To strengthen this feeling I wanted it to give a feel like you are actually holding it.

For me this boiled down to 3 things: 1. Audio from the GameBoy should be affected by the surrounding sounds (i.e. reverberation). The same goes for the actual click sound from the buttons. 2. When I'm playing a handheld I always tilt it in the direction I'm pushing in hopes I will go faster. (Which of course it wont'.) So I needed to add a few procedural animations to make it almost look like you really hold it in your hands. 3. The screen should look more authentic, easiest done using shaders.

I looked for some public domain button click sounds, and booted GarageBand to generate some chippy sounds. I used Reaper to clean and cut my effects. Reverberation in Unity is easy, which is just a simple add object click. (I never used it before though)

Animating the GameBoy was fun to. In Unity you can play multiple animations at once and have them be evened out. Pretty simple, but very effective. I made animations for jump and left and right, as well as some idling. All combined it felt pretty awesome to me.

The last one is not entirely done. A GameBoy has some pixel ghosting, the effect that pixels will not go off instantly but you can still see the effects from a few frames back. This is something I implemented as I thought it was the most interesting for me to make. I also wanted to add a grid, since there is a noticeable gap between pixels on the GameBoy screen. Also the pixels are a bit noisy, both things I didn't add. (But should have been as easy as multiplying the screen texture with a noisy grid pattern.) I did add some screen glare, however it had to reduce it for game-play reasons (you have to stand in specific places to solve puzzles, and I didn't have time to tweak all lights.)

I will (again, please don't be mad) post this image, because It shows all the (visual) things I described.

In hindsight I should have spend my time on another detail: implementing more variation in the blocks. I already made the art assets, but just didn't feel like doing more array checks. But I did these details mainly to relax, so I guess it was a good decision to leave them. But I might still do that just for the heck of it.

Click here to check out the experiment.

Check the first post on Ideation here.