As said before, I'm always hooked by those unusual forms of visual representation, and I've tried to practise in a previous work. But the result of that practice was not ideal: the plot was broken, and the program was not flexible at all (I was using CSS, no wonder). Therefore, in the course Game Creation Ⅱ (why this again...), I remastered the comic book storyboard thing all over again with Unity. It was a relief that the second version of this course didn't require us to hand on a game every week or so. We had a whole half of a sememster to deal with this project. The result, I must say, is quite satisfying.
Brief Plot
A female body, who has lost her memory, awakes in a cabin full of chemical liquids. Based on the clues she found, apparently this is a lab and she is the experiment object. Getting out of the lab, there are many robots in the building. It seems like her existence is nothing to these robots, as if it's normal for an object to be wandering in the hallways. After some exploration, she finds out that she is a clone of the scientist who is in charge of this building. The building is intruded by some unknown person, and the scientist has passed out in her office. Just before passing out, the scientist used all her strength to push the button that breaks the cabin in the lab, hoping that the clone will find her way up to rescue the scientist herself. To rescue or to replace, it all depends on her thought right now.
Content Showcase
Technical Comments
Here you can see the basic of the storyboard setting: each storyboard has its own perspective. What's different with last time is that, not only every storyboard have their own perspective, their pespectives are linked. When the player's position moves, the views in all storyboards will shift acoordingly as well.
To implement this effect, I have given one globally unique color for every storyboards in the legacy rendering pipeline. Then in every frame, I will render the main camera's view first along with the ID colors, then replace each colored region with the render result of the corresponding storyboard's camera's. This way, we don't have to calculate the fancy perspective transform, the problem is just solved in screen-space. The con is that the depth sorting might be incorrect; but that ain't even a problem for our comic-book setting, since every storyboard is laid on the same plane. They can't ever intersect.
Up to this point, the exploration of the "comic-book storyboard" visual trick is finally over. I will continue exploring other forms of visual representation in the future projects.