So this is not an update but a preview of what I've been working on and will release in like a few weeks. Since I've been busy with school I have not been able to do a lot of things that I wanted to but I managed to make some stuff, and the world looks pretty good so far.

So I've worked on the sky and it took a while to figure out how I wanted to make it. I looked up changing the current skybox or editing it but couldn't really find a good way to do it, and raymarching but that's a whole post on its own. So I found a way that was similar to making a water shader. So the clouds are actually a plain object with a water-like shader. I took a video from Roman Papush on YouTube as a reference, they have a whole video on making clouds with a shader and a round plain game object. There are technical issues with this method that I still need to figure thought but so far it really fits the image in my head of what I originally imagined for this game world.

I also replaced all the original junk piles with new ones that actually look like junk piles. Some of these have caverns in them adding some interesting routes to follow. These junk piles are more complex in poly count so I also added LOD groups to everything, this means level of detail, and it allows a limited amount of objects to be rendered by the camera at once, or that one thing it does. I was using the camera range to do this instead but since the clouds are now a physical object I need the camera range to be pretty far by default. LOD groups improved performance greatly, and to further improve performance I made a script to prevent some overlap, only overlap that was completely inside another structure. In the future I might put up a game design post on how I made everything for anyone who wants to know this stuff, likely I'll do that somewhere near the completion of this project.

But for now, here's the remodel of the floating eye monster I discussed in the last update. Not really too complicated but I still like it better than the last one. One of the big issues with this creation are the tentacles, for anyone who is not super familiar tentacles are kind of difficult to rig and animate. They take time to animate manually and I've been considering procedural animation instead.

Progress is going well and I'm looking forward to putting the new updated version up in a few weeks, thanks again to everyone who gave this game a chance, please like and follow it helps my motivation to continue this project.