WEEK 12 - DON'T USE SO MANY LIGHTS!

Right when you think everything’s going well, something comes crashing in…

Our game was going well, a few errors and bugs needed to be fixed but it was getting there. We had our BETA test this week and received good feedback on our animation work but the game was not doing too good. Issues after issues came flooding in and the prime reason – TOO MANY LIGHTS!

Level three, a lot of lights placed everywhere!

We were scheduled to have our BETA test this Sunday but since no one was properly ready with the game, it was postponed to Tuesday. On Tuesday however, we had our game tested by Ahmed (games lecturer). Most of the fixes were on the Games students but I stayed to assist with the lighting that JP worked on. The feedback we received on the lighting was that “it was too brightly lit” and looked “like it was brand new/newly built” – which was very true. We needed to set the mood to a darker and dustier ambiance. So here's how we accomplished that:

LIGHTING AND MOOD

Images from our game where we changed up the lighting to suit the mood. The wall textures are refracting the light weirdly because of the normal map, but in the game, it does what it is supposed to.

We played around with the lighting window in UNITY. Since we did not have a sky-box material, we had to use the default lighting in UNITY. Even though the environment lighting was turned to dim (to represent late evening), a lot of light was being emitted in the scene. That’s not what we wanted. So, we were introduced to the intensity multiplier – a total game changer! We played around with the level of intensity till we were satisfied with how it looked. JP and the lecturers worked on with the other settings such as the bounces, making everything static so that it could be baked instead of Real-time, and kept all the enemies as mixed (baked and Real-time). While we adjusted the resolution to increase the time it took to bake, UNITY crashed a million times. It was taking forever to bake and crashed eventually.

When we finally figured one of the causes of the problem, it was already too late. Submission is tomorrow. One of the causes was that some of the assets (Sarcophagus and torches) had overlapping UVs, which made it harder for the light to bounce off of it. At this point, we are just going to submit a previous version of the game instead. It was really disappointing that we had to settle at this but that’s all we have for now.

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Overall, I feel the journey we took from start to finish to bring our idea of the game to a reality was stressfully phenomenal. But being my first time working for a game, I really enjoyed each and every element of it. Receiving feedback and critique on my work helped me grow out of my comfort zone and push me to working better. I was really bummed out by week 10 when we were told that there was no showcase, and I saw it affecting my productivity a little. Yet, if we ever have the opportunity of building a better game or refining our current one, I would surely do so.

Moreover, I got a lot of my family and friends hyped up about our game through the constant teasers we have been posting onto our Instagram account. We had bigger plans as well. We wanted to record and edit a cinematic trailer, we wanted to make a website and link our game to an online gaming site, and wanted to make it available for the public to play. Unfortunately, we couldn't. But we still hope to in the near future! Here is our Instagram account:

In conclusion, it has been a great studio and I am looking forward to the next. But for now, I need to complete my pending LO’s and do a good job presenting my work for the final.

References:

Unity Technologies (2019). Unity User manual: Lighting Window [online manual]. Retrieved from https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GlobalIllumination.html