Finding Our Visual Identity

Hey everyone!

We've got some exciting updates to share this week, our focus has been on improving the environmental visuals! A cleaner, more cohesive environment helps us better understand which colors work together and ultimately makes the game more pleasing to look at.

Visual Style Update

We’ve made several technical improvements based on the feedback we received. Most notably, we’ve finally nailed the visual style we were aiming for something inspired by Old School RuneScape. If you’re not familiar with OSRS, think of early 2000s games: no shadows, low-poly models, and constant lighting.

Tree (Crystal) - OSRS

We’re happy with the results! Surprisingly, the solution turned out to be much simpler than we expected. We created a custom shader that uses dithering to prevent color blending. This effect is essential for accomplishing that classic pixelated look, and you can clearly see how it keeps colors crisp without smudging.

Black arrow: no shader processing; Red arrow: our custom shader processing.

Environment Setup

We kept things minimal, just a dark background color and a single directional light angled slightly downward. This straightforward setup gave us exactly the atmosphere we were looking for.

Final result.

Technical Insights & Lessons Learned

We also experimented with a post-processing shader, but it didn’t quite give us the effect we wanted. Applying the shader to the whole scene didn’t look as good as applying it to each model individually.

Through this process, we learned something that isn’t widely documented (and we’ll take our share of the blame for having done something very wrong along the way): when using post-processing layers, rendering priority can matters. If you're a programmer, you'll know how useful visible collision shapes are for debugging, but we found they, along with elements like our 3D UI (e.g. floating damage numbers), were also affected unexpectedly by the post-processing.

Collision are hidden by shader.

So, if you're running into strange effects, consider checking your rendering priorities, has it might save you a lot of headaches.

Collision now can be seen.

Thank you for reading and we hope you find it useful!