LogInAugust Håkansson of Motvind Studios shared his workflow behind this environment for the studio's upcoming atmospheric narrative puzzler Beyond The Plastic Wall.
This incredibly smooth, pleasant-looking grass was made by Game Developer August Håkansson with Unity's compute shaders for the game called Beyond The Plastic Wall, a puzzler about "hope, decay, and the things we cannot fix" created by Motvind Studios.
August Håkansson kindly shared some information on how this fantastic grass field was made and provided resources for other developers, who might find it useful.
The compute shader rendering is based on this GitHub repository, an example project made to demonstrate an API that can draw millions of instances running on mobile devices:
The placement and scale of the grass come from the developer's own "kinda strange terrain paint system", which you can learn about in this Reddit post. The cloud shadows also come from a custom shader that uses decal projections to project noise-generated shadows onto the environment. You can see it in action here:
Rich in details, Beyond The Plastic Wall utilizes innovative graphical and visual rendering techniques to create a wholly unique look and experience.
You play as a young scavenger set on a journey across a strange continent that will take you over lonely archipelagos, ancient machine graveyards, barren wastelands, and eventually into the chaotic alleyways, seedy bars, and towering skyscrapers of the last city at the end of the world.
To progress the story, you will have to repair, manipulate, and fiddle with various mechanical and tactile puzzles becoming progressively harder as you dive deeper into the game.
August Håkansson frequently shares development updates on his X/Twitter account, so follow him for more details on Beyond The Plastic Wall and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.