2D LIGHTS, Why and How you could start using them!

in this video we're going to talk a bit about 2d lighting in games and we're going to use both my own examples and some examples from games like hollow knight dead cells and celeste we're essentially going to cover how to use light to improve immersion to make your game look less flat to improve readability to reduce readability and some ways you can use it as a game mechanic let's first look at light as a simple tool to increase readability hollow knight for instance uses this to separate platforms from the background as you get closer to them by reducing the contrast of the background but not the playable area you can quickly see what things belong to the playable area and what it doesn't the way that hull knight does it is by essentially attaching a sprite to the character it works but it can be a bit dull dead cells uses a fancier version of this with a light that also casts shadows let us set up a scene and compare these two without shadows we get the basic benefit of making things close to the character read more clearly and since it doesn't use any calculations it performs quite well if we compare that to the one that cast shadows it will dream performance a bit more but i think there are two nice things about it first i think the platforms become extra clear because the shadow essentially helps define the shape as you move around it second it can give the game a bit more immersion because the light interacts with the environment one potential downside especially if it's really harsh is that it can be distracting which is sort of antithetical to the idea of readability however you implement the spotlight i think it's actually quite a good use and it's not just hollow knight that does it but dead cells and celeste also uses it and maybe you should too the second aspect i think we could look at is a largely artistic one immersion by using light and particle effects you can set the mood and make the area in your game more believable for instance i added light and particle effects to the scene from my video on a simple 2d art and now the light makes it feel more like autumn with sun rays poking through we can compare this to the scene without light and i personally think the assets still look quite okay but there's a stiffness to it and it kind of feels like a level and the light adds life to the scene the next step would be to add animated leaves and critters to even further sell the idea which i'll look into for a future video i also added lights to the scene for my video on grace so we went from this to this with some streetlands lit up it makes it feel more like night time on an empty path you can also see this in games like celeste where torches light up the hotel lighting effects can help sell an idea to the player by restricting the amount of the scene that the player can see you can help sell horror i think in terms of immersion particle effects are often important too for instance wind effects can sell the idea that the place is barren or in the case i showed earlier the autumn scene looks more believable by having light rays shimmer as if leaves are affecting how much light passes through you could also use light as a game mechanic and i'm just going to go over a few the first and perhaps most obvious one is to hide things anything that is in the shadow we make it hard or impossible to see this makes it so the player has to be more hesitant with their movements and it increases tension because the player never knows what's coming next you can sometimes see this used in conjunction with another mechanic an area block a place which is initially pitch black and you can't get through it unless you find a torch or something similar and with the torch you can see what's close to you but not far away another way to use light as a tool in game design is not exactly as a mechanic but as a way to lead and guide the player so you could take an averagely lit scene and say you want the player to go up to a banana or something you place the light behind the banana and now the banana becomes more noticeable the player will probably want to go there because it raises their curiosity so you're essentially guiding the player there but without the obvious arrow saying go here next it's essentially a tool to hold the player's hand without them knowing that they're doing so one method about lights i find particularly cool is their ability to make your game feel less like 2d if we go back to our previous scene for instance with the street lamps affecting every single layer the light feels almost as if it's drawn on top of our screen it feels immersive but flat but if we make it so that it only affects the layers close to the middle but not our foreground elements it feels a bit more as if the light is placed in a 3d environment is one of the reasons i really like particle effects because you can make the foreground particle effects bigger and the background particle fits smaller making the game feel as if it has a lot of depth even though it's completely flat another significantly more cool way to make your game less flat is by using light and normal maps by adding a map on top of your texture you can make it so that the light doesn't affect your sprite uniformly selling the idea that the object is 3d even though it isn't this method is cool but in my opinion really tricky to use i think the best situation to utilize normal maps and 2d lights is to sell the idea that the surface is reflective so in this case i've made a scene where it's raining and using light and a normal map we can make it look as if the rock is wet similarly you could use this method quite well in caves for instance personally i would limit the extent to which you use it because it can easily be a bit too much and as far as i've tried it it takes a lot of effort to make it look okay so it's a bit of a time sink i'd like to add here that you can also use lighting and particle effects to unify your scene what i mean by this is that if we take a random collection of colors that don't mesh together and sort of remind you of minecraft and then overlay a sprite of a specific color you can see that it makes the underlying colors mesh better at least a little bit this is not a substitute for having a good palette to begin with but it can sometimes help unify your assets even more so an example of this is my scene from my hollow knight video where without lighting particle effects and atmospheric perspective the scene would look like this but once i add all of those things it unifies the color scheme and i can even shift it and play around with it even more so i can add those new ones as of teal whereas otherwise the scene would be a bit too violent for my taste because that's part of the thing you make your assets separately from stitching them so sometimes you can end up with a scene that is almost correct but not quite what you want and shifting and adding lights in your game engine can really move it to where you want to without much effort lastly you can use lights to reduce readability dead cells and eternal noctis does this quite a bit in my opinion why would you want to do this well you kinda don't this is more of a warning that lights by their very definition brighten areas on your screen and as i've said in previous videos bright things can often demand attention from our eyes in both the cases of dead cells and eternal noctis the goal of the lights or particle effects is to improve immersion and juice but it can in my opinion sometimes be a bit too much and obviously this is also a taste thing and some people are bugged by it whereas others feel that it really makes the game feel responsive so i add this word of caution that you might for instance want that cast shadow but the shadows are so harsh that it becomes distracting every time you jump or it makes you focus on the shadow instead of the platforms and in those cases it could be good to tone it down it's the same word of caution i wanted that in regards to normal maps because the effect is quite strong and so if you overuse it it can feel sort of gimmicky and almost as if you have your entire scene wrapped in plastic if you want to understand how to implement some of the examples i've shown in godot then check out this video and if you're using unity i left a link to the video i quite liked down in the description bye

Channel: Nonsensical 2D

Views: 6,103

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Id: A6mHoCvTyK0

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022