Before the Easter break, we had shown our lighting test created in Unreal by our group member Robert to the lecturer assigned to our group, that being Mike. The main feedback that we were given was that its a step in the right direction in terms of lighting, however the main critiques we had were that there was too much shadow in the environment to the point that it looked like a horror game, along with one of my previously textured props having too much realistic reflectiveness on its surface. At this point, we were also made aware that Unreal’s lighting engine is build for games with realistic art styles, and we were told that in order to make a cartoony style work, we needed to actively go against what the lighting engine was made to do.
So, over the Easter break, I assigned Robert the task of going back to the Lighting Test file and make adjustments based on the feedback we were given, however later on during a group meeting, we decided to reassign some tasks, to which I gave myself the task of finishing the lighting test.
My main goals with the lighting test were to reduce the shadows to get a “flatter” lighting style as advised by Mike. part of how I achieved this was to add rectangular lights behind the 2D character sprites in each room to brighten up the scene without causing a glare effect on our character sprites, along with adjusting the rectangle lights to avoid having noticeable lines of light on the floor in the background. Then, I found the world directional light for the scene and adjusted its angle to shine directly into the submarine’s interior along with changing its colour to a high tone of light blue, which greatly heightened the impression of the submarine being underwater. Lastly, I duplicated the point lights in each room to have three for each lighting colour, setting the centre lights to be the brightest, and having the two additional lights be reduced to half the strength in order to have more depth with the lighting itself, along with adjusting the reach of the lights to have them reflect off the floor as well.
Whilst working on the lights, I also turned off the “Cast Shadows” on almost all of the environment objects, not only to reduce the high contrast shadows, but also to remove the large shadow being made on the background. However, I am not currently able to do this with the floor assets, cause if I turn off “Cast Shadows” then the Point lights show through the flooring. I asked my group members in Game Design who are more familiar with Unreal if there’s any alternative way to remove the shadows, however none of them have gotten back to me with an answer at the current point in time.
Below are three screenshots of my finished version of our game’s lighting test, along with a video of our player character running through the environment to show how they look under each lighting colour, due to my computer having issues with running Unreal, the video showcase is not the highest quality unfortunately. All I need now if feedback on this version, and if any changes need to be made then they’ll be outlined in another blog post.
Safe Lighting-
Warning Lighting-
Danger Lighting-
Video Showcase-