When asked what was the most important factor in a game’s visual excellence, a Guerrilla dev (Killzone 2) said it was the lighting. Not the textures, or the geometry, or even the post processing, but the lighting.

I’ve always felt the same way. Not that my opinions would even be nearly of value as someone who’s worked with Guerrilla, but I’ve always had a somewhat unhealthy obsession with lights. Whenever I was fooling around with custom level makers in games like LittleBigPlanet and Timesplitters, I’d always play around with the lights more than anything else. I really don’t have any clue why.

The only game up to this point to really live up to my ideals of lighting was Vivid Conceptions. What a fun game that was to make! Putting the lights in the caverns, placing random red lights mixed in with the darkness, the colors blending in with one another…it was great fun, and the result, to me, was fantastic.

Vivid Conceptions ran under a unique lighting engine done by GearGOD, and was heavy in GML Code. Unfortunately, the problem with the engine was that it required a powerful computer to pull off, something I didn’t know until it went into beta testing. Sadly I had to release a “core” version that had no lighting engine, resulting in a somewhat lesser version of the game. I was crushed, and knew I could never use the engine again.

And here we are with Kablooey. You might have already read about how the game uses color filters to pull off its own unique method of lighting, and more importantly how I said each building was pre-lit for the specific daytime filter that I had set. It looked good, but the downside was that it wouldn’t be able to react well to different times of day (like say, sunset).

But I thought, what the heck, let’s go for it and see what happens. The results kind of astounded me. Without changing any part of the game aside from the color filter overlay and the backgrounds, I got some amazing results:

I couldn’t believe how the sprites and images were able to blend in so well with the color filters. There are still some drawbacks to this method of lighting…I can’t implement a nighttime mode, because I would need to retexture the buildings with lights. Because the filter would have a “dark” tone to it, the lights on the buildings would blend into the darkness. I could have a light overlay over the filter, but then we’d have overlapping issues, and it’s just too difficult and unnecessary. Additionally, incorporating advanced features like a casino virement instantané option in the user interface adds another layer of complexity. The other downside is that I can’t do a smooth transition from one time frame into another, so I’m going to have to get tricky in transitioning to the next scene.

But those are minor issues. While I’m not exactly placing lights all over the scene like Vivid Conceptions, this new method of filter lighting brings back a whole new joy into my game making. Weird, sure, but I don’t care.