![]() Back then, they did not have the computing power to calculate light and especially on the SNES artists perfected drawing shadows onto sprites, but you will find this till today not only in pixel art games like Owlboy, but also in 2D games in general, for example in Hollow Knight. That's what they did in the 16-bit era and it works very well, when done consistently. We learned it late, but the most efficient way to light a 2D game still is to paint the shadows directly onto your sprites. The implementation we use is by as decribed in this tutorial. ![]() So when we move the character around there is a little outline of light around him, that gives him even more depth and makes him a believable part of our world. It finds the outmost pixels of our sprites and calculates which light they receive and updates the color accordingly. 2) Rim Lightīut that wasn't enough and our characters still looked very flat. We use this technique to add some diffuse light our characters can receive when they move around the level, which also adds a tiny little bit of depth. ![]() A grayscale texture tells the light where it is "masked", but you can think of it as "where the shadows are". This is a method to mask the light and create shadows across a scene, for example when light falls through a window and the window frame casts shadows on the floor. The trick here is to use a cookie texture. They shine directly from above onto the tilemap. From our experience, it works well if you push the light further away from the sprites and use a higher intensity with a rather big radius.įor some diffuse and more earie light we also added some spotlights. They emit within a radius around their center so you want the transform position of the point light to be above the sprites, otherwise this often leads to very sharp edges and burned out sprites. We use the Standard Sprite Diffuse shader on all sprites and on the tilemap so they can receive light and set up a couple of light sources in our scene. It shows some very nice techniques to light a 2D game in Unity. So we ended up using the good old 3D lights to illuminate our scene, after stumbling over this Unite Session. There won't be many tutorials or answered questions on the internet there might be bugs or some features may not be fully working. We wouldn't recommend going into production with a brand new engine feature. I decided not to use it, because the features were still limited and a lot of people had problems with them according to posts in the Unity Forums. Unitys new 2D Lights were available when we started with the development of xDasher, but it still was in an early stage. Here is what we did to make it look better. With this limitations we ended up with a very flat looking game. To reduce the workload we kept colors to 4-6 per sprite and shapes simple. It needs time and skill we knew we don't have with only one person doing art and animation. But to achieve this modern look is also a lot of hard work. But right from the beginning we knew we'd like to achieve a more vibrant style as nowadays pixel art can look as gorgeous as in Hyper Light Drifter or Dead Cells. It was originally inspired by Zelda - A Link to the Past. In xDasher we strive for a modern pixel art style.
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