Who doesn’t love good ol’ extravagant god rays (sun beams)? Lighting, unsurprisingly, is another universe on its own. That’s why they have light designers for games. In this game I got me, so it should turn out pretty well. Unreal has tons of material on lighting, and tons of in-depth videos of how they used it in Fortnite. Their engine does an awesome thing where they store light data in several points in an area to get more accurate lighting and store it to save memory. I probably didn’t explain it well enough, but basically it doesn’t merely shove light into a scene. Check out these floating balls that captures all the light data.
There is also a video on workflow enhancements, that showed tons of useful tips and tricks for using the program. They always talk about performance, and optimizing a game so I need to do my best to keep that in mind with what limited knowledge I have. It’s an indie game after all so I don’t wanna overbuild in the first place where even I couldn’t run it. I completely forgot Unreal also have some free lesson plans on their website so I might start some of those soon.
The rest of my time was spent adjusting the settings of the lights and the fog, mostly to create the sharpest god rays I could. It’s costly to the GPU, but it looks too damn cool to not use. Since the lantern is an integral part of the game I have to find the perfect balance of fog and lighting. I accidentally got to a point where the lantern was creating a trail of light as I moved. It looked cool, but I probably won’t keep it, though I might do something similar with particle effects later on.
My current concept for the first level will be set inside a building or several buildings connected to one another. Tight spaces, lots of windows, and limited lighting. Started out with a prototype hallways to see how the light shafts would look and I wasn’t disappointed. I need to find a better way to make these rooms, and I’m sure the marketplace has something for level design.
Purple light is very important for the first level. It might not be as harsh as the images above, but it will be the prime color for the area. In the final output I’ll consider using fake sunbeams so it always appears through the windows no matter the angle.
GoldenGratus Games 