Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals
It’s that time of year again and, with Christmas rolling in, I felt inspired to revisit an old passion project. Over the past few months I’ve taken a deep dive back into the Unity engine and it’s HDRP features. This resulted in some of the most dramatic visual updates the project has received to date.
A lot of these changes stem from HDRP itself but my improved knowledge of shader programming is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I brought myself to rethink how snow, lighting, materials, and transparency should behave in this world. This update is mainly a showcase of what’s new, what’s improved, and how much more optimized the game has become.
One of the biggest visual upgrades comes from my updated snow tessellation system. Snow has always been a huge part of the game’s atmosphere, so it felt essential to fix how it’s rendered. With a new compute shader driven approach, large masses of snow can now support displacement maps x3 as large as before. Snow trails now look much sharper than the old release.
Previously, the game relied on pretty archaic blitting method (Graphics.Blit) that caused frame-dropping whenever large chunks of snow had to be updated. That old system was functional, but not ideal for a modern game.
One of my personal favorite additions: the Gummy Shader, created entirely in shadergraph. Before, getting that translucent, rim-lit, soft-edged material look required two shader passes. one for rim-lighting + thickness maps and another for blur, refraction and specular highlights. While it was performant, I just wanted it to look like it belonged in this era (I’ve seen the “It looks retro!” comments)
With the new transparent pre-pass features, I was able to fit all of that into one beautiful shader. I wrote my own distortion algorithm in place of using Unity’s built-in distortion and fed it through custom nodes to make the shader as unique as possible. The result is much more visually convincing.
Lighting was another core area I wanted to revisit. The environments in MSC rely heavily on the atmosphere of icy caverns, foggy mountain peaks, etc. None of that would make sense without proper lighting.
HDRP introduces new soft-shadow and contact shadow features. Combed with SSAO, these gave me the ability to set the mood of each area with far more depth. Shadows no longer appear harsh or disconnected; instead they blend naturally and respond more realistically to how surfaces interact.
This overhaul dramatically shifts the tone of many scenes, making everything feel more immersive and grounded.
Major Fixes:
What’s a major update without some bug-fixing?
Checkpoints will store locations after reindeer rescues, key collection, and various other progression triggers immediately instead of after cutscenes.
The Specials Technique Menu now lingers on screen for a longer time. This gives players a more comfortable time-frame to choose their move.
Fixed an elevator glitch that caused players to spawn at an incorrect starting height under certain conditions.
Updated the persistent data path for save files to improve reliability across different platforms. Some players had experienced game freezing due to protection levels.
To wrap up, this has been a refreshing return to a project that means a lot to me. These visual and performance improvements bring the game closer to what I’ve always imagined it could look like, and I’m excited to keep pushing it further.
I hope you enjoy the updated look and feel of MSC. Stay tuned for more updates, experiments, and bts peeks as development continues!