For the longest time, I didn’t plan on using any real time lighting in the game, let alone let the objects cast shadows.
Instead, I wanted to push the comic look of the game by painting any shading and shadows into the texture maps. Also, this was meant to improve the performance of the game by keeping the graphics calculations to a minimum.
The problem was: Having no shadows made it significantly more difficult to estimate Sam’s distance to any of the surrounding objects. Due to constantly testing the game, I myself got used to this at some point. But recently, several friends who tried the game reported that they often didn’t know whether they had passed an obstacle or not.
One of them suggested that having Sam and the obstacles in the game cast shadows could make recognizing where Sam was in relation to other objects much easier.
So, I bit the bullet and implemented real-time lighting and shadows into the game. This involved more than just flipping a switch in the code:
- I had expand the custom shaders I used up to this point to support normals, lighting and shadow maps,
- I had to implement more granular settings for the level objects so I could control which of them would cast and/or receive shadows,
- and I had to keep an eye on whether the game would still run on phones and tablets.
I think it was worth it: I feel that not only does the game look much nicer than before, the shadows do help with navigating the levels. And as far as I can tell, I kept the performance hit to a minimum.
You can see a video of the new graphics in action for free here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/127234056