The game is a sort of a mix of Missile Command and tower defense, where you control a bunch of dinosaur sporting a variety of weapons and trying to defend themselves against the incoming waves of meteors.
;)
When figuring out the lighting and rendering settings for the characters, I started with a pretty basic setup of one sunlight, and ambient occlusion enabled.
This setup looked alright but the direction of the light source seemed too obvious, and I figured it would look strange in any environment that wasn't outdoors. I needed something a bit more neutral.
I played around with toon shaders to no success, then eventually settled on a solution using Blender's compositing nodes system to combine certain render passes and exclude those I didn't want. The final composite is a combination of the colour pass, and the shadow and environment passes at 20 and 25 percent opacity, respectively.
;)
The shadow layer gives some basic definition to the shapes. The environment layer provides distinction between adjacent shapes of similar colour, and also shows details like the fingers and toes.
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