Restitched Lighting Upgrade (Patreon)

Hey there!

Before our next Restitched: Recapped! post drops, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what we've been up to with the game's lighting system. Your ongoing support for our progress means a lot to us, so we're always excited to share these promising behind-the-scenes updates with you.

Just to fill you in, we've always used a custom voxelized lighting system that we built from the ground up for use only in the gameplay zone. It was built to be more performance-friendly than the engine's native lighting tech and intended to give the game its own special look with things like custom ambient occlusion, shadows, and fog. But, as it turns out, it became a bit of a headache. It didn't quite meet our visual standards and was causing our devs a lot of extra work with very little documentation or team knowledge on how to work with it. We didn't have the resources to keep fine-tuning it. So, after a lot of back-and-forth, we decided to ditch it in favor of third-party tech and Unity's own lighting tools.

Ultimately, the removal of a lot of this custom voxel tech has increased the game's performance a bit thanks to modern-day Unity engine optimizations!

Here's the cool part: We're not just stopping at swapping out the tech. We're also working to add a few new settings that let you tweak shadow quality, mess around with fun "cookie" effects (think water caustics, funky disco patterns, you name it), turn on volumetric fog, and crank up the intensity of the light/exposure. These changes mean that shadows will be more realistic, moving lights will look smoother and stretch further, and the lighting will behave much more realistically. 

We've even cooked up some custom code for volumetric lighting, creating some very pretty atmospheric fog effects that you can enjoy both in the game zone and the backgrounds.

We're going to dive into all of this in our upcoming Recapped! post, so stay tuned and keep your peepers open – there's a lot of cool stuff on the horizon!