As said previously on past devblogs and twitter. We've participated in the Ludum Dare 44 game jam, and the game we made is named Sheep it! It's a small comfy exploration kind of game. You use sheeps as a currency to get new tools, and you have to send more than 150 sheeps to complete the game.
You can watch my complete playthrough video of it on youtube.
One aspect of the game that got people attention was the art style and overall animation, so i'm gonna share with you 2 shaders created during the jam to achieve this look, and some animation process for the player and the sheep.
By the way we were very much inspired by a game called Ollie and Bollie, this is an awesome experience made by sokpop, https://sokpop.co/
The Flat shader
First we needed a flat shader, for flat colors with only a drop shadow on the ground.
There's not a lot to talk about here, i just use the vertex color of the mesh to render the final color without any light or shadow.
The shader for the ground is the exact same, only with shadow, and color to control it.
This gives this simple and yet very effective result:
The only thing you need to pay attention for is the color you choose for the vertex color, as this is this exact color that will be rendered in Unity.
The Wobbly shader
/!\ Warning: We tried mimicking the effect of the vegetations in Ollie and Bollie but we are not sure how they really did it, if it's entirely 2D or if it's 3D. My guess is on 3D which would explain the post-process choice but then again playing the game i realise that some of their assets clip with one another just like transparent sprites would.
As you can see it's just billboard rendering, which is extra cheep for environment setting. In shader language it is a plane with transparent rendering and vertex displacement (we removed batching for this one) .
And this goes in the fragment part. You can notice that i've put the alpha channel of the vertex in the vertex part, that's because we want extra control over which part of the billboard moves, if I want to make a bush, i only want the top part moving.
If you want this shader in your game I strongly suggest you do not keep the transparency, and to switch it with a cut off opaque, because transparency is a world of hurt. But for my game I wanted really sharp circles.
For the shadows i cheated and duplicated the bush 90° on shadows only.
Animations
Every animations were done using Blender, a great tool for everything really. The main character was rigged with IK feet and animations in general were interpolated using the back curve:
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