For the farm theme, I was responsible for creating the tower models and their projectiles and VFX, and I also created the corn model. I also created a mobile friendly unlit shader which was used on most 3D assets to maximize the amount of batched draw calls.
For the shaders I used Shader Graph and HLSL. For modeling I used Blender and textures were made with Substance Painter.
Each tower uses a single 1024x1024 albedo texture and they fall between 2k-5k triangles each.
I created various realtime VFX in Unity to be used as effects for the towers and their projectiles. The fire uses a shader which I built using Shader Graph, and the "Ice Beam" uses the same shader as the fire but with different parameters.
An example of a material which uses the unlit shader I created for the project. This was used on most 3D assets. It features texture blending, fake specular and shading, support for matcap textures for faking metallic and glossy effects, a "wiggle" effect which moves vertices based on a b&w noise image, a rimlight feature, and a color overlay feature.
The fake specular and shading could be controlled via a script attached to the main gameplay camera (see below for more details), and a lighting override option was available in case we wanted some objects to have a differently rendered light or shading.
Since I am not a programmer and we didn't have a tech artist in the team, I built this shader with the help of AI using HLSL. It proved to be good enough for prototyping purposes and the performance on mobile device was solid!
A demo of the script which controls the fake specular / shading effects. I wanted to use an unlit shader for the game because it is the most performant option, but I also wanted to have the option for adding some kind of shading and a specular highlights for added artistic control, so I needed to build a script which provides all of this when used with the custom shader I built above.
There is also a fake fog feature which could be used to easily affect the mood of the whole level. I wanted this feature because we wanted to be able to quickly build lots of variations of levels in case the game went on from the prototype stage into production.
The script was built with C# and I used AI extensively when creating it since I am not a programmer.
These are some of the visual style and theme testing variants (medieval theme, post-apocalyptic zombie theme) that we explored before settling on the farm theme. I modeled and textured everything you see here and these assets were used for building mock-up screenshots for market tests. Both of these screenshots are from Unity and use a single unlit shader. The assets were textured in Blender with a "gradient palette" type of workflow (no idea what the official name for this is :p) and they all share the same single texture which was the gradient palette. Each of these took me about a week to model and texture from start to finish and all of this was done in a pretty hasty manner without polishing things too much, as the art lead did a final paintover on these for final touches for the market test.
An offline rendering test from Blender using the medieval assets which I made.