During the early stages of our development, I wanted to create a realistic lighting experience for players to fit into the theme of light we so heavily use in our game. I had worked with lighting in the past, so I was confident that I would be able to create dynamic lighting for use in any scene we had. At the start of development, the main thing that was worked on was the color of the light and making sure the rays could shine through the canopies of trees.
The color was initially a more purple glow that encompassed the night sky, to prevent certain colors from becoming dull.
This was most noticeable when we first applied lights to beaches resulting in a purple hue that was nearly indistinguishable from the sky.
To better separate the sky and ground, we chose a more natural light source of moonlight.
Closer to the first public preview event at the Stout Game Expo, we addressed the lighting again with a sky light to get smoother shadows on objects since the light settings had built improperly, causing the shadows to be pure black instead of smoothly flowing.
The Sky Sphere
The sky sphere was added to give context to the sky lighting. I adjusted the directional light to ensure that it would point in the direction the moon faced on the sky sphere, to give the sky a reflection on the water we had surrounding the map. The design was later replaced with a High Dynamic Range Image to give a more personal spin on the sky so the unique lighting of our main map would make sense.
It then got replaced with only stars so that the moon and its reflected light could be moved easier and would display a proper glow on the ocean as intended.
Emissive Textures
Emissive textures were used all over the map for our plants, hero assets, and even some of the rocks laid around the map. Emissive textures are textures that emit a glow without truly casting light on other objects to save on resources. Since the Land of Lights was based on bioluminescence, this was inevitable. The way we used these textures were done in parts. The first step was texturing the plant as normal, but then, we would implement a mask around the texture itself, giving it a glow in certain parts of the mesh.
For hero assets, this texture glowed in an animation created by panning a texture mask along the standard glow texture that followed a mask that kept the light only in the divots between the veins of the leaves. It gives the player a sense that the island is alive with light from the local flora, fauna, and island itself.
