I spent this week working on incorporating the example scene styles into the game. Here's a short teaser showing some of the progress
I've been learning a lot about Unity's lighting and rendering systems while trying to match the sample/concept art styling, but progress is going fairly well. There are a lot of "gotchas" for those new to these systems, but hopefully I've figured out most of them already.
Bugs of the Week
#1 Bad Light Import
The example scene I had almost exactly matched the concept art, but it existed in a separate Unity project. I did what I thought was the sensible thing and opened that project, selected the scene and exported it as a Unity package. I then went to the PogoChamp project and imported it. When I opened it inside the PogoChamp project, the lighting was pretty far off.
Left is the original version of the scene, right is the scene after importing it into the project.
Somehow during the import into Unity, the primary light source in the scene was disabled. A relatively simple fix, but still caused me a bit of confusion.
#2 Active Scene Precedence
This one isn't technically a bug, but it did confuse me for some time. While trying to match the style of the example scene, I decided to use Unity's Additive Scene editing feature. This would allow me to modify my existing scenes, while simultaneously viewing / editing the sample scene. After some experimentation, I realized that the order I used to opened the scenes dramatically impacted the way they appeared in the editor, which determines which scene is "Active".
I looked for anything I could in the scenes that would cause this difference, but it turned out that I needed to open the Lighting panel (Window > Rendering > Lighting), which stores lighting settings outside the actual Scene asset. Once I changed my existing level's lighting settings to match the sample scene, things started working as I expected. Not actually a "bug", but it's something easy to miss.
#3 Lighting Disappears?
I haven't actually found a solution for this one yet, so if you know how to solve it please let me know!
The sample scene uses a bunch of point lights to give the surfaces varied colors. The sample scene is a large open space, so it made sense to use large, distant point lights, to spread the lighting properly across large surfaces. The game levels on the other hand are often small enclosed spaces, so big distant lights don't really work. While seeing if I could bring point lights inside the level to give some light/color without being too bright, I ran into the following situation.
When I change the light's range or intensity by a tiny amount (< 1%), suddenly the light's effect completely turns off. I would have expected it to get just a little bit dimmer with either of those changes, but nope it's either too bright or completely off.
I'll be continuing work on styling next week. Wish me luck!