I’m always thinking on how to make the game look better, and I thought perhaps dynamic lights might give the game a bump in visual quality. So I took a screenshot and did a quick 2 minutes mockup of how it would look like if the game had dynamic lights and shadows. Here’s how the game looks right now (simple circle light), followed by dynamic light mockup.

I thought that looks nicer! So I invested some time to make a simple implementation as outlined here and here.

This is how the dynamic lighting prototype looked. I modified it a bit to expose part of the platforms as otherwise it would be just dark.

Ok, the platform edges can be smoothened, and even the shadow edges. But the gist was there. The first reaction was WOW. But then after some playtesting, the shadow lines dancing around with you weren’t a nice effect as I had imagined. Since the light is always with the player, the shadow lines were always on the move and believe me, it really annoys you while playing it. It may look cool in a statical image or even in a video, but when playing it it feels like you have a sort of cognitive overload with all those shadow lines zapping around your avatar.

So yeah, back to simple circle lights 😀