fault x Unity - Bunch of New Toys (Patreon)

*Disclaimer: We are fully aware that we aren’t pioneers of any of these techniques.  This is just a quick behind the scene's of how moving over to Unity has given us new tools to enhance our games.

 When I first started ALICE IN DISSONANCE, the idea of marrying the language of cinema and visual novels wasn’t even a concept in my mind… which is odd because as many of you know, my profession before starting ALICE IN DISSONANCE was in fact, videography and filmmaking. Scene composition, scriptwriting, the usage of cameras, editing… all of these “visual storytelling” concepts were things that I've learned while on the clock but when I started writing milestone one, these particular tools immediately dropped to the wayside and was completely forgotten about until milestone two: A. It was my first ever writing project and I was 100% focused on the “novel” aspect, where there are no visual “cameras”, no visual “scene compositions” and no visual “blocking”. Somewhere in my subconscious, I completely threw out the “visual” side of “visual novels”. Looking back on it now there are many reasons why this probably happened (including a lack of resource and confidence to try something unconventional) but I believe it was mostly because these two concepts tend to not marry in the mind if you’re not actively thinking about the medium (or are actively thinking about storytelling in a visual sense which requires a completely different skillset than writing a novel). But, why should one be less important than the other? It’s ubiquitous in English now to refer to these reading games as a “Visual Novel” so there's no reason why the visual side can't learn from the language of cinema. How can we merge these two into something that will feel organic and not just a hodgepodge of random techniques that were executed for the sake of “because we can”? 

 My answer was to introduce the concept of the “camera” in all of the scenes and not just the defining moments typically called the "event cg". 

 The first thing we were able to pull off was sliding the camera left + right, and crane up and down in a faux 3D space to emulate parallax. This gave us the flare of depth but more importantly the choice of composing scenes inside of what would normally be considered a one-off background, opening up further BG design choices that can be complimented by the camera's position. Imagine if the BG asset of Sol and Mil’s house in milestone two: A was separated into 3 different backgrounds; the house, the table outside, and the garden. Now imagine Sol moving from the front of his house to the garden with a fade to black transition. It would disrupt the sense of continuity and space resulting in a more fragmented scene. Having 1 large background element and dollying the camera left and right gives it a new feel that you don’t tend to see in conventional visual novels.

 But here is where Renpy started showing its limits… Even though the camera movement in faux 3D space was a great addition to our storytelling, this is no escaping the fact that these techniques are at best basic and at worst a gimmick and cannot be expanded upon without other effect elements. RenPy's lack of "visual" flare was starting to show it's limits. (It wasn’t the engine's fault in anyway. It just wasn’t designed to do things with heavy emphasis on visual flare).

 Porting our games over to Unity for console was in a way a blessing because we now have powerful graphical tools that just comes with the engine. So… now with that long ass intro out of the way, these are some of the new tools (toys) we've gained access to now that we are on Unity. First, let's take the scene we’ve made in the tech video to introduce some of these.

Depth of Field - Depth of Field or DoF for short, basically lets us focus on certain elements of the scene while blurring out what’s not important. It gives us the ability to guide the audience’s eyes by utilizing a technique called rack focusing.

Rack Focusing - Rack focusing is a technique used to pull focus from 1 object to another, usually without moving the camera. 

Macro Rack Focus - Macro shots are basically extremely close up shots, depicting small items much larger than life size. We are able to do macro shots, thanks to our super high resolution sprites. And thanks to the real 3D space that Unity provides, we can now tilt character sprites 2-3 degrees to achieve depth on a flat 2D image. This let's us achieve a super shallow DoF and rack focus from 1 plane to another.

Motion Blur  - The bane of all gamers, but is in fact one of the most important elements that gives movies the "cinematic" feel. It is a common misconception, especially when it comes to video, that the more FPS is better. While this is true when it comes to games where accurate assessment of a scene is vital to the outcome of gameplay, movies do not function this way because a movies goal is not to achieve "technical visual clarity".

Particles - The particle system in 3D space gives a static scene depth, even while the game goes idle.

Vignette - Vignettes are useful in various ways. We mostly use it when someone is focusing or thinking to themselves.

Not shown in video (we'll get to them later):

Chromatic Abrasion - Chromatic abrasion's happen when a lens fails to focus light properly. The result is a image where fringes of the subject start to fray with a chromatic split.

Camera shake -  As the name implies. Gives the camera an organic feel if used properly.

Each of these effects do not make a scene but used in tandem, we are able to achieve scenes that we were never able to do before.

More behind the scenes stuff to come!

*Posts from here on out will be patrons only.

-Munisix