Mix as you like - Shader magic in Tavern Talk

Today's entry is about our thoughts and initial approaches to the drink mixing minigame in Tavern Talk. 

As the innkeeper of a tavern, you mix various potions for the individual visitors to strengthen them for the upcoming tasks. Drink mixing is one of the main mechanics in Tavern Talk, so we want to make it as fun, beautiful, and polished as possible. 

For this our artist Clara drew a rough sketch, so we know what the merging of the individual ingredients could look like. In order to be able to implement this in the later game, we are working on a shader that we are building in Unity's shader graph. 

This shader should include features like the following: 

• Display each individual layer in color (later with a noisy gradient) 
• Show a separate surface layer 
• The drink can map different layer heights 
• You can tilt the drink and the fluid rotates dynamically in the opposite direction 

To better control the content of the drink, we divided the content into surface, bottom, front, and back, so you can adjust the transparency and height as you like. For the additional layers, here the bubbles, we add a second camera to the scene, which only renders the bubble FX on a render texture. The only thing we had to do was to blend it together. 

The drink mixing now looks very natural and pretty, and we are really happy about the result!