Art Deep Dive: Optimizing the visuals of Glow Season in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as the technical design of impossible spaces in the M.C. Escher-inspired game Mind Palace, the transition from digital illustration to indie development with comic book writer and artist Meredith Gran of Perfect Tides, and designing and implementing controls for the mobile port of PC and console title Descenders. In this edition,  Sarah Northway, co-founder of Northway Games and creator of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, shares with us some visual tips and tricks used to take the game from Unity prototype to full console release.

Taking a game from Unity prototype to Switch and PlayStation can involve compromises, but what you need most are some good tricks and custom shaders. Our narrative deckbuilding RPG I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is set on the alien jungle planet Vertumna, which you run around and explore as you grow up. I was still getting to know Unity when I created these outdoor scenes, and mistakes were made. But over five years, I learned how to make our complex outdoor scenes fast and efficient.

I’m Sarah Northway, co-founder of Northway Games and creator (/designer/coder/co-writer/art director) of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, as well as the narrative city-building series Rebuild and other games. I might be best known for traveling the world with my husband for five years when we first went indie. It was the jungles of Central America and the coral reefs of Southeast Asia that inspired Exocolonist’s lush landscapes and focus on the