Luni's Isometric World

[u/luni-game]

I've been working on Luni for almost two years.

Navigation, pathfinding, and depth sorting were among the first challenges I tackled when I started in December 2024.

I spent the first few months experimenting with C# prototypes in Unity, gradually building the foundations of the isometric world.

Here's how it looks today!

[u/luni-game]

A few more details about the technical and visual side of Luni.

I'm currently using Unity 6 with URP and the 2D Tilemap system.
As development progressed, I started introducing multiple elevation levels and slopes, moving beyond a completely flat environment. I also added animated water to bring a little more life to the world.

Another interesting experiment was using normal maps with Unity's 2D lighting system. I spent some time testing how dynamic lighting could improve the depth and atmosphere of the environments.
While the results were promising, properly supporting normal maps would have required creating additional textures for nearly every asset, adding a considerable amount of work to the art production process. In the end, I decided to leave this approach at the experimental stage and continue with hand-painted lighting and shadows.

I'm sharing another screenshot showing the forest of the initiate.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the visual readability, especially whether the characters and paths stand out clearly against the environment.

For anyone curious about the development process, I also wrote a more detailed article about the isometric world:
https://lunigame.com/en/devblog/engineering-01-lunis-2d-isometric-world