Once these systems reached a fairly finalised state, one of the more interesting phases of development begun: the creation of custom assets. These were made to help give the game its own unique style and theme, rather than relying solely on pre-made elements. This included models, textures for those models, textures for the environment, the occasional custom shader for special effects, and a great deal of custom sound work.

Custom models were an important element, creating a unique aesthetic for the game. The style was generally kept cartoony and light to make the game pleasing to see and accessible, while still making sure important elements were given appropriate visual detail/highlighting. This included Whac-a-Mole tables, the targets that pop out of them (each given a distinct silhouette), the hammer the player picks up, the table the hammer appears on, and a tutorial blackboard showing off the basic controls. Modelling was done via basic hard-surface techniques, and materials for these textures were also made procedurally with Blender’s shader editor.

After the models were done, a couple of basic environmental textures were made for the walls/floor of the playable area. Since the level was kept very simple to provide focus on the important Whac-a-Mole tables, these textures were also kept simple, though given a little detail with normal maps and the like to help improve the aesthetic.

Some custom shaders were made with Unity’s shader graph editor, namely a glowing highlight effect for teleport locomotion elements (such as anchors the player can teleport to or the visual highlight showing where they will end up).

Finally, and arguably most importantly, custom sounds were made. The primary mixing was done via REAPER, using its helpful region system to batch export multiple variants of sounds as OGG files. Sounds were created for all important in-game events, such as: menus interaction, hammer interactions, targets appearing/disappearing, targets being hit with variants for each type, the table’s countdown timer and score events, and miscellaneous events such as player teleporting or hammer respawning.

These sounds proved to be an important element of the game, as they not only provided instant feedback for in-game interactions, but helped to improve the sense of tactility the game had (swinging a hammer and hitting something only to be met with silence is terribly underwhelming!). When all the sounds were implemented in-game, playing at a Whac-a-Mole table felt instantly more enjoyable – targets popped up with clunks and clacks, hitting them created a thunk and jingle, running out of time is immediately noticeable once the timer starts beeping, this and so much more.