Introduction
Fading Routine is a short 2D narrative prototype.
The goal wasn’t to showcase complex mechanics, but to practice storytelling through Timeline animation and URP-based atmosphere design — exploring how simple tools can build mood and narrative flow in a small piece.
Concept
The story begins with a quiet daily routine:
- Life in the village, gathering wood, calm conversations.
- Gradually, that routine starts to fade:
- Warm tones shift to cold.
- Villagers disappear.
- Mira turns into light and vanishes.
- The protagonist is left alone, with the scene unresolved.
This was never meant to be about combat depth, but about narrative pacing and atmosphere shifts.
Design Approach
1. Timeline Animation
I used Unity’s Timeline to control narrative events and pacing:
- Character fading: villagers and Mira don’t vanish instantly — they dissolve through Timeline keyframes.
- Pause for impact: Mira’s disappearance is extended with a deliberate silence, giving space for the moment to land.
- Camera cues: Timeline drives subtle zooms and pans, reflecting tension and isolation.
Timeline allowed me to direct the sequence like film editing, focusing on rhythm and staging rather than coding every detail.
2. URP Atmosphere
URP Volume Profiles handled the shifts in tone and mood:
- Everyday life → warm lighting, soft tones.
- Something feels wrong → lower exposure, add vignette, colder tone mapping.
- Collapse → stronger color shifts, desaturation, emptiness in the scene.
Timeline + URP in sync:
- As characters fade, URP tones shift at the same time → disappearance feels part of the world breaking.
- Mira’s final moment → vignette closes in, colors drain → amplifying loneliness.
Timeline showcase of axe-to-sword transformation and URP atmosphere shift.”
What I Learned
- Timeline = pacing tool: like editing film, it controls pauses, camera movement, and disappearance timing to build emotion.
- URP = mood switch: without writing custom shaders, URP alone can shift the entire tone of a scene.
- Combined impact: fading characters alone is subtle, and color grading alone feels flat — but when both align, the emotional weight multiplies.
Conclusion
Fading Routine isn’t a full game, but a narrative and atmosphere design exercise.
Through Timeline-driven animation and URP-based tone shifts, I practiced how to deliver tension, loss, and uncertainty in just a short fragment.
It showed me how much rhythm + atmosphere can carry storytelling, even in a minimal prototype.