When creating our game Wayward, our team decided to try and use a little lighting in Unity as possible. We have had some trouble getting the look exactly how we want it with basic Unity lighting in the past. All of the shaders in the game are unlit, so no matter what the environment lighting is, the look stays the same. I made use of Shader Graph in Unity to use nodes to make the shaders that I need. Starting with the "trees" in the game we decided to use something called the fresnel effect. Basically fresnel is the amount of light reflectance on an object based on the viewing angle. We were able to use it to highlight the edges of the 3D Models. It created a 3D look while the objects were completely unlit and it works at every angle of the camera.

The shader was set up to be able to control the color of the edges and the color of the inside which was kept black.

Without the fresnel, you can't even tell that the tree is a 3D model.

Its a pretty simple shader with just a few nodes, but it was very effective for the look we were going for. Another shader that was created was one for the glow underneath the player. This was created by having a large radial gradient that was transparent and a smaller one in the middle. It creates an effect where it looks like the "light" is is more intense right underneath the player which would make sense if the player was emitting light.

Our team has had a lot of fun checking out other games and seeing how creative people can be with graphics. There are many great games with fantastic graphics this time around. I hope you found this useful or at least somewhat interesting. Come check out our game Wayward, we would love to know what you think of it!