Steam News8 June 20251y ago

[DevLog] Grass Movement

Hello! Today, I’d like to briefly share how we improved the movement of grass. Initial Version This is the grass that existed in the early stages of development.

In this update3

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Repeated intro

Hello! Today, I’d like to briefly share how we improved the movement of grass.

What changed

0 fixes2 additions2 changes1 removal

Gameplay
Maps
Performance

changedHello! Today, I’d like to briefly share how we improved the movement of grass.

addedInitial VersionThis is the grass that existed in the early stages of development. When we placed it in the game, the static appearance looked dull, so we tried adding a wind-swaying effect.

addedInitial VersionWhile the added movement was nice, the auto-generated visuals weren’t particularly appealing.

changedNew MethodIt was implemented by passing a curve value to a vertex shader, which then calculated the position. Despite being pixel art, the mesh bending felt surprisingly natural.

removedFinal ResultWe no longer had to bake textures each time the image changed, and the visual quality was vastly improved — very satisfying.

Frostory changes

changedHello! Today, I’d like to briefly share how we improved the movement of grass.

addedThis is the grass that existed in the early stages of development. When we placed it in the game, the static appearance looked dull, so we tried adding a wind-swaying effect.

addedWhile the added movement was nice, the auto-generated visuals weren’t particularly appealing.

changedIt was implemented by passing a curve value to a vertex shader, which then calculated the position. Despite being pixel art, the mesh bending felt surprisingly natural.

removedWe no longer had to bake textures each time the image changed, and the visual quality was vastly improved — very satisfying.

Initial Version

This is the grass that existed in the early stages of development. When we placed it in the game, the static appearance looked dull, so we tried adding a wind-swaying effect.

To achieve this, we pre-baked tilted versions of the grass generated via code.

While the added movement was nice, the auto-generated visuals weren’t particularly appealing.

Hand-drawing everything was too much work, and it didn’t seem like it would be much better anyway. Also, having to re-bake the textures every time we modified an image was a hassle.

Still, since we couldn’t come up with a better solution, and it looked much better than static images, we just stuck with it.

New Method

We happened to see a scene from the game Eastward.

There was grass swaying in the wind, and even though it was rendered using mesh bending, it didn’t feel out of place at all. Seeing this helped us break free from the idea that pixel art had to match perfectly at the pixel level.

Here’s an example we made using a mesh-based approach.

It was implemented by passing a curve value to a vertex shader, which then calculated the position. Despite being pixel art, the mesh bending felt surprisingly natural.