Summary:

Hello! This is my first of many devlogs for my new Nth Dimension[al] Hiking game (which will maybe have a cool and/or dumb name sometime in the future maybe).  These logs are starting kinda sorta in the middle of development rather than at the very very start, because I actually began prototyping this project well before uni started. I'll go over this in a bit more detail in the "new stuff" section, but basically what this means is that I'm not going to be covering the character controller or shaders (just yet. I might actually come back to clean these parts up in a later log) or anything that is already in the prototype, just new new stuff.

New stuff:
Everything! As I said before: I've been in the prototype stage of development for a while and have built a fairly stable controller and a solid graphical style which probably won't change a great deal during the rest of production.
This week I began working on a new level which I will use for play-tests this week, as well as for a public demo this coming wednesday (Aug 1st) which is very exciting.
The level I am working on is uhh... a tower I guess? I'm trying to work out what kinds of structures work well with both the character controller, and the graphical style, which is kinda tough. I'm using unity basic shapes (cubes. it's all cubes. all of it) at the moment, but I'm thinking about moving to using pro-builder, so that I reduce poly-count, and have greater control over structure details etc, which are important mechanically and graphically.
I also recently switched up my scene lighting pretty dramatically (see below). It used to be all dark and spooky (which I really like and will definitely use again in the future), but now the sky is bright and pink (!), so that I can have strong silhouettes of structures in the distance etc, which I think looks really cool. I'm going to do more tests and experiments with lighting and colours, to help differentiate different parts of the game and set different moods, later on. So look forward to that!

For those interested in what the game used to look like, here's a tech demo that I made a while ago (it also shows a couple of iterations of the shader too) :

Changes:
In future logs I'll write about things that I've mentioned before, but have tweaked or altered slightly. If I replace something altogether then that'll end up in the "new stuff" section, but all smaller changes will be documented here.

Coming soon:
Uhh... a complete level I guess? I've blocked out most of what the environment will look like, now I just need to detail it and add a starting area and then that's basically it.

Thoughts:
Making this all with basic shapes is really time-consuming, but it's also kinda fun. I haven't done anything like this since my first ever unity project, and it's very compelling; plopping down each individual brick and stone and stair. It takes forever but I like it. It's probably not a feasible method if I want to be making big complicated levels later on, but for now it's a nice break from coding.

Anyway that's all for now, hopefully the play-tests go well and the whole thing doesn't break during the demo (or if it does break hopefully it breaks in an exciting way).

bye :)