Rigging
I made all of the character sprite sheets in Outgrown with their limbs and heads separated, then assembled with bones in the Skinning Editor. To make animations easier, I programmed the bones with the 2D Inverse Kinematics package — this allows for movement of the hands and feet that make the joints above them move in tandem.
Splines
I made the majority of the levels in Outgrown with splines and sprite shapes. I created various tiling textures for the sprite shape profiles.
Particle Effects System
To separate the background objects, and make them visually distinct from interactable elements, I created a particle system to act as a screen between the layers. Texturally, it calls to mind dust, but also ripped stuffing, to match the theme of desecrated toys.
Animation
First, I made the graphics for the logo in Adobe illustrator; the text, moon, and eyes. I imported the assets to Adobe After Effects to animate the moon and the blinking eyes into the O’s of the logo, then I recomposed the composition to bob up and down.
I converted the resulting video into a .mov to have video transparency, then I set up the rest of the UI in Unity. The base of the background assets are from Upklyak, cut apart and edited to be usable for a background with parallax effect.
Shader Graph
I created a shader for fog to create distance between background and foreground layers.
In addition to a glowing material shader for stars, I wanted some stars to twinkle at random intervals. I followed a tutorial for creating a star-scape, then added nodes to make them dim and brighten over time.
Particle System
This particle system was made with a simple texture. They blow in the same direction as the fog.
Scripting
For the final details, I created parallax between the layers with a script to offset layers position from the mouse when it moves.
Shader Graph
The third and final level of Duality is a confrontation between the player character and a spirit and thus needed extra details to increase wonder and excitement. I created lights like the aurora borealis with Shader Graph. This gave more visual interest in the sky and also helped catch create brighter spots to be affected by our post processing volumes that were not otherwise displaying.
3D Modeling
The style of our game was designed to be colorful with the interest coming primarily from color, since our shader would flatten any small details. Since our world would also switch colors to represent different layers of reality, the designs had to stand out in different color environments.
