With all the visual feedback and shared-camera gameplay in mind, it's clear that features may be difficult to read at a distance.
To tackle this, a few visual effects and tricks where used to help alleviate any issues the distant camera angle may cause.
READING INFORMATION AT A DISTANCE
To help split up meshes and actors in the session, Post Processors were used to adjust brightness and sharpness to help bring the mishmash of free and purchased assets to a more cohesive middle ground.
Additional Shaders such as soft Character-only Outlines (Custom Render Depth) were also used to ease up the character shape-language on extreme camera distance to allow a fairer isometric camera and avoid any nausea in motion. There was also the test for using custom bands to add a cel-animated effect for distant reading but it lead to more complications for lighting passes, something that I'd only look back into if there was more time.
Luckily with the cute style, having shadows use their LODs actually streamlined the process of simplifying the shapes from a distance. Due to this, a fake cartoon spot-shadow was provided to major actors to help Players to understand what is tangible on the arena. The next stage to this would be to test out coloured shadows or icons to accompany it for the case where multiple visually-similar participants are taking part.
ROTATION MACROS
Furthermore, due to the camera's high angle, all active participants are set to perform Isometric Rotations during run-time to help give a more flat feel and ease animation depth (as some angles lead to loss in shape language).
The rotation macro simply keeps actors on a light pivot based on the characters rotation, where the tilt on the character looks like a standard 2D isometric character angle due to the FOV.
Hope this was a nice insight into readability at a long distance!
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