I've been putting together a new Unity development environment that I am calling The Maze. It is basically a playground for keeping my game-dev experiments in one place instead of splitting every idea into a separate project.
Right now, this version is mostly about getting 3D rendering into a strong place. So far I've made custom Unity render pipeline features for planar reflections, screen-space reflections, procedural clouds, cloud shadows, water, volumetric fog, lighting, sun rays, shaders, and a custom post-processing setup. I will probably open source some of the individual graphics features later once they are refined enough for other people to use outside my own setup.
In this screenshot, the scene is running at about 175 FPS while drawing about 6.34 million triangles, with a GPU frame time around 5.6 ms. There are only 52 draw calls and 23 set pass calls since there is not a full environment here yet, so those numbers do not mean the whole thing is optimized, but it is already a good sign for the kind of scenes I want to build.
The Maze gives me a place to experiment and prototype quickly within Unity, with different input modalities and rendering styles, without creating a bunch of new projects. The goal is to find interesting gameplay systems, tools, playable slices, environments, animation setups, and other experiments, then combine the strongest parts into final projects later.