It's been a long while since the last update. My freelance work required more attention, and I also made a pretty massive blog post comparing the cinematic tools of Unity and UE, which took most of the time I would've otherwise spent on the game this year. If anyone's interested in the topic, here it is.
However, the last couple of weeks I've had ample time to focus on a new update.
New tutorial
The first mission used to be also the tutorial. This forced me to steer the player in a certain direction with some artificial triggers and indicators, although the mission is pretty open sandbox-like in nature. Now there's a wholly new tutorial level explaining the basic things. Though it still continues a bit into the first actual mission, the tutorial elements there are much less disruptive.
Update to Unity 6 and lighting improvements
I was using a pretty outdated version of Unity, so I updated to the newest big release a couple of months ago. It should have some improvements for lighting and rendering performance at least. While getting acquainted with some of the new features (and working on the blog post about cinematics), I also tried out the realtime global illumination system called Enlighten, not new to Unity but new to me. It's a good way to add some convincing indirect lighting, which you can see from for example the shadows on the left side cast by the pillars on the screenshot above having a teeny bit of light. It has quite little effect on performance, but still, I had to be selective about which parts to bake to keep it playable on Steam Deck. I also found better shadow settings with some help from Reddit, enabling nice looking soft shadows which I put to use with the quality set on High.
Other additions and fixes
I finally added leaning left and right, useful for spying on guards. While the head is still a target they can see, it's a smaller target at least.
There's an outline now as an indicator when you can knock out an enemy
I did a few rounds of playing through the campaign and fixing bugs and problems I listed during the playthrough. So without going into detail, there are lots of bugfixes.
Since the Unity update changed my settings, I also reworked the skies, now using the cloud layer in addition to volumetric clouds (with a cloud map provided by Unity). Better or worse than before, I guess it's up to the viewer to decide.
Now I'll move on to making new content. Pace has been slower than I've anticipated, but it's all coming together slowly but surely.