Embedded Files
A short disclaimer: Most assets in this environment were downloaded from the Unity Asset Store.
This school assignment was mostly aimed at teaching us about visual steering, but I chose to design an environmental puzzle and to optimise the Unity project.
The biggest challenge of this project was getting the players to understand that the statues symbolize the drawings/statues on the cave's walls, without it being too obvious. As seen in the video, the statues have a bunch of objects laying around them that make it more clear to which caste they belong. This was added after I discussed with a few players that the puzzle was not easy enough to understand the story which I wanted to tell. I think this mostly became because the amount of self-made assets we were allowed to use in this project was restricted, and the assets I could find that fit this environment were really limited. I worked around this by using different materials that signal the castes' wealth.
This caused the puzzle elements to be somewhat inconsistent at times, but at least people were able to solve the puzzle while understanding the hierarchy of life that was common in this ancient civilization.
After designing this environment's puzzle I made an extensive asset list. Because I wanted to make this environment in URP, I had to do some trickery with lighting the scene. For instance: I used a particle systems to fake the godrays.
I also used various models and textures from Unreal's Quixel Library, which I had to optimise to use in Unity. This meant remeshing the models and compressing some of the textures.
I also made all normal maps in this scene 2x smaller than the albedo texture, a trick which I knew was used in Naughty Dog's games a lot. This cuts down on a lot of memory usage without impacting the look of the game.
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