Nelvaris: First Contact Gets a Makeover - Part 1

Hello all,

This game, Nelvaris: First Contact has been in development for roughly 18 months, and I believe I have hit a bit of a wall with its development, therefore over the past two weeks I have been thinking of ways to make the game stand out more.  There are 3 main areas that I am currently working on to help improve this, and I will be posting about each of these areas as I am working on them. The area I will discuss in this devlog are the graphics

Changing the Graphics

Currently I believe the game looks pretty good, but a little generic. It looks like a space shooter and does not stand out from any other space shooter just by looking at it. I tried to make the game look a bit realistic with the directional lighting, however ambient lights were also used to highlight darkened areas of the ships, bloom and saturation were also added in post processing. I also chose bright colours for the ships to help it stand out.

However this didn't seem enough, while it was nice and colourful it didn't really pop and so I had the idea of making the game look a bit more like a cartoon, this also helped me in other ways that I will outline shortly.

To create this cartoon effect I upgraded the game from Unity 2018 to 2019 and applied the Lightweight Render Pipeline to it. With the LWRP I can apply two key features to create the cartoon effect, one is a black outline around all 3D models, and two is to lower the colour count of everything on screen. While this the black outline looked great, the low colour count looked terrible for skyboxes. The solution was to change the colour back to normal and edit the textures themselves. I made them brighter and more cartoony by applying an edge filter using paint.net. Then in the game I removed all bump mapping and specular highlighting. The ships now look flat and colourful like a cartoon.

On top of this I changed the colours of the ships of the two races in the game, from red for the Humans and teal for the Nelvari, to Green for the Humans and Purple for the Nelvari.

The result

The end result can be seen in the attached comparison screenshots. I believe overall the game looks brighter, more colourful, and the ships pop out more thanks to the black edge lines drawn by the LWRP.

Since the game is more cartoony it now allows me to make the game less realistic in the design, story and content. More of that to come.

I have attached 4 pictures, an old and new shot of the Nelvari homeworld, and an old and new shot of Nelvari and human ships.

Still to come

The following two areas for me to highlight in upcoming devlogs are the name of the game, and the story, both of which will be getting their own devlog soon.

Thank you for reading, if you have any comments or feedback I'd be interested in seeing them.