Trout Priest - basic level & gameplay

I have been getting the level terrain and basic mechanics working - moving around, attacking enemies, and finishing them off with a buffed attack.

Since working on Flock , I have a lot of experience with Unreal's terrain system (and I absolutely love it), and am always disappointed by how limited Unity's terrain system is. But just to get the gist of the land, I sculpted a winding river with a peak in the middle of the map for the player to return to for health/buff replenishment. I made a basic normal-detecting setup in the shader to give steep edges some mud.

This will definitely get another pass down the line, but for now it offers a great stylised edge, and definitely does a decent job while saving me time painting individual cliffs.

The river also got a little bit of love, using some vorinoi cells to emulate the caustics of standing water. I wasn't sure about having standing water for a river, but it does perhaps fit the feeling of gross stagnation the game is going for.

Again, it's simple but it does the job much better than a simple solid-colour plane. If I have time I will give it more attention, maybe some ripples as the player walks through.

It has been tough, but I've resisted the rest of the art pass and focused on getting the gameplay working smoothly.

The controls  for the game are simple - left analogue stick to move, right analogue stick to rotate the camera. I found a great tutorial on how to make this setup in Unity

And just like that, it already feels like an actual game.