Create the Perfect Setting for Your Horror game or Visual Novel with this Classroom Scene.
Visual novels have a strange sort of evolution in the gaming world. They have traditionally been rather niche in the west. With the rise of the indie development scene and the access to easy to use templates and assets the genre has exploded here.
There could be various reasons why that is, rising loneliness in people both young and old or an idolization of ultimately unrealistic good times. The end result is the glut of visual novels in the market right now that range from terrible to amazing to terrifying…or all three. Mind you my thoughts on those three games are entirely subjective and I am sure they have fans that would fight me at noon with their katanas to prove me wrong.
Japanese style horror is also a genre that marks itself away from the general mores of western horror. I for one happen to enjoy it a lot more, they capture an essential wrongness to the world that I find delightful. All of that and more is what ran through my brain whenever I looked at this asset pack for the first time.
The sign of a good pack is definitely the amount of ideas that just burst into your brain when you look at it, so let’s take a closer look at this one and see if it’s worth making those ideas a reality.
The folder hierarchy is pretty simple for the amount of assets that are in the pack. Though this leads to a bunch of assets clumped into large folders, it does make for a simple folder setup.
The assets are pretty easy to find even clumped together so this hierarchy is pretty good for this pack as far as I am concerned.
The materials are all built around unique UV sheets for the most part. Certain things like the floors, walls and ceilings are tileable materials. All of the textures either 1k or 2k maps, this is perfectly fine as far as efficiency goes. There is nothing lost visually by working at those resolutions and some of these things could probably be dropped down even further. Things like the brush and dustpan for sure could be. Things like the books should stay the same so you do not lose fidelity on the text.
The materials themselves look pretty good in engine. They are using the Unity Standard shader and utilize only a few base maps:
This makes it easy to manipulate but also limits WHAT you can manipulate. You can definitely take the maps into an alternate program like Photoshop if you want to add your own changes, etc.
You can see this in action with wooden surfaces of the desks most of all. There are two different types of wood and slight recolors of them. The grain repetition is easy to pick out. If these were a fake wood than this is pretty easily explained but if this were to be simulating real wood then it is likely that these desks would mostly have different grain patterns.
That aside, it is less a bad mark and more of an observation. There is a great attention to detail on the materials, with grunge and light scratching even where you would not normally see it in a game that can give you a lot of options as a developer. You do not have to worry about hiding parts of these meshes in your project no matter what happens.
The Meshes themselves are well made, nothing stands out as problematic with them though I will caveat this with the following; I am less practiced in Unity and have more trouble digging around and finding the right asset information. These meshes were not in a way that I could open inside of blender and see them in all their glory.
They seem pretty simple though, a lot of work here is being done via normal data. So you are trading mesh for texture calls, how your project runs is going to dictate how useful that tradeoff is going to be for you here.
So to answer the question posed at the beginning, I do think that this kit is well designed and perfect if you have a very specific sort of game or project in mind. I could see using this to put together an interesting scene.
With that said, I do not think that its price point is in a good place. 24.99 feels too pricey for what you get, you would have to make this a primary focus of your game to make the cost worth it to you.
Overall I would suggest this pack on its merits but I would also say to maybe wait for a sale if your game does not revolve around a Japanese classroom.
The developer has a ton of these sorts of packs so you should check them out!
Some Pros to force your hand
- All the assets you could need for a very specific scene
- Good materials and meshes, you could redistribute these into the same or other scenes to create ones more unique to you and your needs
Some cons to take away.
- At $24.99 the price seems a bit high.
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