Saturday Update #1 news - Naruto: Naiteki Kensei

Welcome to Saturday Update #1!

It's been something we toyed with before in R1, finally we have an overhauled cel shaded style!

For those of you who've been around since we were just learning to walk, you might remember this update. Back when we were first starting there were discussions about which direction our art should go in. We ultimately decided on a more traditional painted style because of the limitations the Half-life engine had. We still had some Cel-Shaded textures from those early testing days but they never made it further than that Friday Update because of negative feedback. Admittedly, if we had remembered to turn on the Outline shader they may have looked better, oh well!

Now that we've moved to Unity, we have much greater control over exactly how the engine shades and lights our characters. This allowed us to go back and decide that having a Cel Shaded style would be greatly to our benefit. Why? The first reason is it allows us to spend less time on texturing characters, we can focus that energy elsewhere in the project like on more characters or better maps. Secondly because the textures don't require much detail we are able to ensure that areas that do have detail (face, decorations) have a much higher resolution and therefore have a much sharper appearance! And thirdly, because we have control over all the lighting effects we could dream of.

Unity gives us a fantastic control of color, direction, intensity, and multiple other choices to use for lighting. We can really make Jutsus pop out or locations seem truly dynamic. Not only is it exciting for us to have so much control, but it allows us to do so much more with our game play choices. But that's for another update!

P.S. Follow us on our brand new YouTube channel! Not only will it keep you up to date with our newest videos, but you may even see a thing or two not posted on our main site!

Check back next week for Saturday Update #2: Naruto's Reveal!

- The NNK Team