The biggest problem so far, visually, is that the world has appeared too empty. In a way, that was intentional, as the fundamental story of the game is about the main character bringing the world back to its feet. In our 2D arrangement, the emptiness was a little bit more bearable, I think, with the lovely parallax effects adding a certain abstract heart to each scene.
Unfortunately, it was harder to get a similar effect in Unity without increasing the visible distance to insane lengths, so the world ended up just looking a bit bland. It left us with only one course of action, to rethink how the world itself should "work", ie, what should fill its spaces? In the original design document, any organic material (wood, etc) had long been faded away into dust. Now though, we've gotten a little more liberal with the idea of a dead world.
Rocks, wood, houses, and even whatever is used on the blades of a windmill, all managed to survive the fictional apocalypse.
The game hasn't changed though. The message still remains. Stuff's never hopeless.
Also, I've been working on a short video showing some diversity in the Sprout scenes. Take a look!
Don't forget to share and tweet and retweet and follow and watch and like and uh, you know, all that good stuff.
One word: Dynamics
If a scene in a game feels dull, try to put stuff in motion. Take a forest scene for example. Just adding wind that animates the leaves can make the difference. Even if it's so subtle it's barely noticeable, it's something that makes scenes come to life.
My advice would be looking into the sky (not literally of course :D).
Imagine the clouds moving by. Depending on the orientation of the player, you could also see the sun in the background. As clouds move between you and the sun, you could achieve some pretty sweet effects using HDR, tonemapping and lens-flares.
On top of that you could try replicating what Crytek did in Crysis 3 where the terrain/props have shadows from the clouds on them.
Here's a time-lapse:
Moddb.com
If I understand it correctly, they aren't really using the clouds to cast shadows but a simple texture that's scrolling by. Either way it looks gorgeous.
Considering how the sky takes up large portions of the screen it should be worth looking into. If you were to add cloud shadows, it would affect even more. Not sure how one would implement it in Unity though. Maybe a large decal? I don't know.
Anyway, it's always nice to see an update on this game.
Keep it up! :D
Thanks. I think we would end up using a cloud shaped texture on the camera as a kind of decal. I'm not sure if we'll be able to add some kind of shader to that to give it some motion, but it would definitely be worth trying out.
I don't think applying it directly to the camera would look any good. You really have to apply it to the world geometry.
The actual animation shouldn't be too hard. You could just have a script slowly increase the offset of the material. That way it would scroll automatically.
I would either use a large decal or put actual objects between the world and the lightsource that drop shadows.
The first one seems like the more sensible approach to me.
Man reading this again these are some great ideas. We need to get on this