I had my idea, which for now I am keeping to myself, 3 days into the jam.
I am a complete unity3D novice, tho I am a published researcher with a CS degree so hopefully this shouldn't be too hard.
Currently I am still getting all the parts of a minimum viable prototype together (about 50% complete), with other features to be added afterwards.
Low-res simple geometry with pixelated normals is definitely an...unusual art style, and one I just kinda accidentally fell into, but I think it adds a lot of depth to otherwise flat cubes.
Plus it (and the spheres) makes my game look way better than Minecraft with relatively little effort
It's pretty simple in my opinion.
When creating your textures, think about which parts would be raised up above the surface of the object in question were it in the real world. Once you have the texture saved, make a second grayscale texture with white being the raised parts and black being the crevices and stuff. You then import it to unity, set it to convert the asset to a normal map (make sure to check the create from greyscale box), and have the texture remain the same as the source file (32x32 is the smallest size unity allows).
Be sure also to resist the urge to bake any lighting effects at all into the regular texture. That's what the normal map is for. Your regular texture should only encode albedo.
My minimum viable prototype now sits at ~70% completion. My next order of business is to beef up the asteroids and enemies. After that, who knows?https://youtu.be/FczVdWk27nM
