This allows you to make sure lights are only cast on certain layers (any object in the world can be part of a layer). This isn’t my favourite compromise as it means the lights essentially turn off as you reach a certain distance, but it is a good ‘catch all’ method for making sure we don’t have too many lights shining at once.Īnother Unity thing is light layers. Fortunately, in Unity you are able to set distances for lights to be active.
It’s not perfect, but this method helps to light up the street with additional ambient light. Every object that spawns in the street (for example a red paper lantern) can alter the ambient colour of the overhead area light slightly. This is designed to mimic a mixture of all the ambient lights in the street.
Over every street is a large area light, which casts a colour down on the street. In this scenario, however, I’ve come up with a way to ‘fake’ having a bunch of ambient lighting. There are a few cases where this is tricky, however mostly the street scenes. If calculating all this is expensive, then use less of them right? Fortunately, having fewer lights creates some nice heavy shadows which kind of lends quite well to the noir genre. Although it’s common for a game to feature a mixture of both baked and real-time lights anyway, the nature of the levels where nothing is predetermined means Shadows has to use 100% real-time lighting: That’s a big performance hog. Lighting is a big one as it means you don’t have to ask the game engine to bounce light everywhere when playing. Much faster than trying to figure out all those calculations in real-time. Baking essentially means precalculating tricky things into a bunch of data the game can read when you play. Most non-procedurally generated games feature baked lighting (and not just lighting actually, it means you can do all sorts of yummy baking). That’s great and everything, except when it comes to the technical challenge of lighting. Shadows of Doubt is a procedurally generated game. I’ll also say that just because these bits have been difficult, it doesn’t mean they haven’t been fun to work on in fact, they’ve provided some of the best learning experiences of the project so far. This one is more about my role, which is mostly design, coding and project management. Perhaps we’ll visit some of those in future blogs with the relevant team members. I should probably note this doesn’t include challenges for writing, voxel modelling or audio work, ie the stuff I largely don’t do.
This month I’ve put together a list of some of the most challenging aspects of creating the project so far. Hello everyone! Welcome to a fresh new edition of the Shadows of Doubt dev blog. Be sure to wishlist on Steam, join our Discord or read previous dev blog entries here! A unique mix of procedural generation and hand-crafted design enables every room of every building to be explored. Shadows of Doubt is a detective stealth game set in a fully-simulated sci-fi metropolis! There’s been a murder and it’s up to you to solve it by any means necessary, with the condition that you keep a low profile.
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