Last week I spent most of my time trying to implement light into the levels. The biggest problem I had was to get a cozy atmosphere in the levels but still make it playable and not to dark. The reason this was so hard was because our temple is positioned inside/under a mountain. An easy way to get the right type of light would have been to have windows for example which would let me use the light from the sun, but this was not an option. As the different levels are positioned inside a mountain I had to use holes in the roof for example instead. This did not give the best effect as the holes don’t light up as much as I wanted. Instead I had to use “fake” light by positioning point lights with low intensity around the levels. A challenge which I faced quite early was that I could not use the same type of light for the different levels as they vary in size and have very different themes. Also, overall all the levels feel rather dark at the moment so that is something I’ll have to look at in the coming weeks. Maybe there will be other effects in the lighting when the correct meshes and textures have been inserted into the game.
Water Level
As the Water level is the smallest map in the game it was quite easy to get a nice light in the room. What I did was that I added a point light in the middle of the room which covered a huge area. This point light has a rather high intensity which lights up the whole room. On the walls surrounding the puzzle a couple of torches were inserted. These torches removed some of the shadows and even gave the room a more living type of light.
Wind Level
This level was quite hard to light up as it is so huge. Whenever I inserted lights around the map shadows appeared which made it next to impossible to play the level. A reason for this is probably that there are a lot of different height differences throughout the room. One way to fix this is to either have different point lights around the room which light up different parts or inserting a very low intensity global illumination. At the moment I have used the point light option but will have to look over it again after we have inserted the final meshes.
Fire Level
As there are a lot of moving objects in this level the lighting changes whenever you do something. This has a huge risk on the overall feeling of the room and has to be fixed using dynamic lightning. The positive part of this level though is that it is not very big which means that I can use less light sources. To get the ambient feeling of a level of fire torches were the obvious choice of lightning. Also, the fire traps that are introduced to the player in this level play a very important part as they will turn on and off which will light up and darken the level.
Darkness Level
The main challenge of this level is the darkness surrounding the player as the name of the level says. The higher up the player moves it gets lighter. In Unreal Engine 4 there is a default option of eye adjustment. What it does is that over time the players screen gets lighter and it gets easier to see the surrounding environment. Although it is a very interesting effect it breaks this specific level. The way to fix this is by using a post processing tool which exists in the engine. The room will have to be divided into three different levels of post processing where the eye adaptation has no effect at all at the bottom but gradually increases the higher the player gets. For this level it seems that point lights won’t work as well either as they light up to much of the level. Also, the light produced by a point light feels completely wrong. Instead I decided to use a variant of the torch which looks like a brazier. What it does is that it lights up the specific areas where the player can move but does not light up the traps and pitfalls in the level.
Corridors
The corridors throughout the game are completely closed and there is no natural light which can enter. The best way to light up these areas was by adding torches. The biggest problem here was that when I added the different torches the FPS went down a lot. The option here was to change out the dynamic fire for static point lights. This gave the corridors enough light so that the player can easily find the way but also seems as the torches are actually burning.
Simon Säfström 