Im currently working on a lil game. I had a lot of ideas for VR games, UIX, Interaction after playing some VR games, trying different headsets, and seeing lots of amazing implementations in Resonite, so I decided to start tinkering on it. Most games use simple 2D UIs, basically Desktop game UIs ported to VR. I want to make a game that uses VR to its full potential. like actually using your hands instead of a laser pointer.

First feature

The first thing I implemented was a really cool feature I knew would work because I've experienced it in Half Life Alyx. It was the Gravity Gloves. I am not sure if this will be a base feature or an Item in the game, but Im sure it will be a lot of fun to use.

Messing with shaders

I love it when games use low poly + pixelated textures, and I recently saw what looked like per-texel lighting in Valheim, so I really wanted to try and recreate it, because I've never actually found a "low budget" style. I didn't have much experience with writing shaders so I thought this would be a cool way to learn lots of things aswell. In the end I managed to do everything like lighting, shadows, and even outlines(tho thats an SRP Feature not the shader). I also made the lighting incremental for style. So from trying to achieve this random thing I ended up having a really cool shader I'll be able to actually use now.

Huge shoutout to GreatestBear for the post about texel snapping. All the things they shared along their development really helped me understand how to do use it. And here's Robin Seibold's video showcasing Outlines with SRP. Honestly the video is really chill to watch, and they have the end result up on github.

I do have to say, hand writing a shader and being able to support Unity's features is pretty hard, especially since its pretty hard to find the right answers on the internet that are not super outdated. 90% of the time I found info about something it was deprecated. And for my shader to actually write to the depth buffer I had to use a DepthNormalsOnly, which was a pain to figure out. figuring out how to do lighting with the CG->HLSL changes was also annoying, especially since all the info I found were on the old CG syntax, and all the includes they used were all CGINCLUDES.

Currently my plan is to use slk-image2pixel to turn my textures into pixelated ones.
Here's not a texture but me!

Now for a real example, heres a texture I would've never used since I really don't like the style of it, but with the pixelation it looks really cool!

Here's a comparison for a "realistic" texture.

I want to mention that the app can do way more than just pixelation, and you should really use these features to make your textures look better.
Setting the right palette size and adjusting the colors really makes a big difference.
I also recommend using Cluster Sample Mode sometimes, it can preserve shapes pretty well.

Simplification

After spending a lot of time on the shader I realized that I was overcomplicating things. It was really good for learning, but I wanted to make the game too, and I didn't want to keep going back trying to fix things so the shader works with all of Unity's loosely documented features.
So I decided to just modify the URP shaders to have the same effect.
And from now on I will do this when I need a new feature.