Lighting for Design: Research 1
Information collated from articles written by artists at Pluralsight, Naughty Dog and an indie developer.
Lighting & Mood
Lighting choices set the mood and tone of the game. It is potentially one of the most important and influential roles in the game for creating mood and tone. Many of the uses of lighting in film and other media can be applied to creating mood and tone in video games, however they differ in the fact that games offer something films do not. They are interactive and so cannot be approached in entirely the same manner. As games offer choice, lighting can change based on player actions. Moving cameras are the main difficulty, due to offering different angles on the same thing.
Lights have great impact on the feeling of a game - it determines player expectations through adherence to tropes. For example, horror games (like films) often have minimal lighting, sometimes a flickering light to establish a fear of the dark and the unknown. When creating a game, light shouldn’t be placed purely to light a scene, it should influence and adhere to the mood and tone the game aims to convey.
Distinguish different lighting styles for indoor and outdoor. Cameras outdoors can go pretty much anywhere. More to cover in looking good. Use time of day and weather to advantage. Sunny weather allows for Godrays. Dense rain allows for fog and reflections. Night allows for fire. Indoors, utilise electricity, fire, flares or flashlights.
Less is more. Focus on the key light, every other light should support the key and emphasise the key as much as possible. Too many lights can result in a confusing direction. Use photographs and films as reference.
Lighting & Hardware
Baking lighting in games saves on render time by giving the illusion light is being cast from a source when it is in fact, baked on to the texture of an object. Hardware advances ramp up player expectations on what they expect from their games, badly lit scenes can ruin a good game experience. Anything bigger than the character is worth light-mapping, anything smaller is probably not.
Utilise engine features such fog, Godrays, dust, glows, reflections, specular highlights, shadow, fires, flares, lightmaps to make specific features pop out. Avoid using white lighting, very few sources of light have white light. Light takes into account the environment it is in, what it reflects off, but take into account colour connotations. E.g. red connotes danger, but is one of the cooler shades of light in terms of the source of the light’s temperature.
Lighting & Immersion
Light should always have a source. Light doesn’t come from nowhere, whether it be the sun, the moon or a lamp, it has an originating source. It should also be appropriate in its intensity. This helps increase immersion in games, and can quickly break the immersion if done incorrectly. Use sky, shadow and exposure alongside story and gameplay to co-ordinate colour and mood.
Stay faithful to style or photorealism, depending on what is needed in each scene’s art direction. Use lighting to build depth, a focused sense of direction and distinguishing between for, mid and background geometry. Don’t over exaggerate, shouldn’t interfere with gameplay.
Light can be used to lead the player in the game world. It can be used to help players identify objectives or threats.
In dark environments, don’t just go dark. Players like to see the environments, don’t let them get lost. Aim for bitch black in shadows, such as in a torch level like small rooms/caves and with cut scenes. You don’t need black to feel in the dark. In reality, our eyes adjust to low light levels.
Pluralsight (2014). Light Up Your World: How Lighting Makes All the Difference for Games. [online] Pluralsight.com. Available at: https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/film-games/understanding-the-importance-of-lighting-for-games [Accessed 28 Jan. 2018].
Tokarev, K. (2017). Learning Lighting for Video Games. [online] 80 Level. Available at: https://80.lv/articles/learning-lighting-for-video-games/ [Accessed 28 Jan. 2018].
Hourences (2006). Lighting in game environments - the hows and whys tutorial. [online] Mod DB. Available at: http://www.moddb.com/tutorials/lighting-in-game-environments-the-hows-and-whys [Accessed 28 Jan. 2018].
