Hi everyone,
Hope you're enjoying the beginning of summer! As the sun rises earlier and sets later, we wanted to share a quick look at AWAY's lighting system.
Artistic liberties in the natural world
Initially, we weren't sure if we could do both day and night modes because of the challenges posed by lighting. Our first few attempts just didn't feel quite right, and it took us a bit to pin down the unexpected reason; our lighting system was *too* realistic!
When the sun neared the top of its arc across the sky, shadows formed directly under models, while the models themselves were harshly illuminated. Under these conditions, the world looked flat and unnatural. While it's more pronounced in a game world, this is a real-world phenomenon too (check out Lahaina Noon).
In order to create a more natural atmosphere, we actually had to deviate a bit from pure realism! Our Art Director created his own tool that allowed precise control over lighting conditions to fine-tune and perfect our dusks, dawns, and everything in-between. We can tweak sky colour, sun colour, sun *light* colour, and more!
That isn't to say we just went mad with power though - as with all of AWAY, we did a lot of research and amassed folders full of reference images and art to try and nail that perfect documentary feeling. Our goal wasn't to replace natural lighting, but to highlight it.
Designing the day and night
Using this custom tool, we've tweaked the daylight to look warmer, while the night looks colder. We've also programmed the sun and moon to stay closer to the horizon, avoiding the strange lighting conditions caused when the light source is close to directly overhead.
Contrasting our golden morning light, our nights are predominantly blue. With all the dark colours involved at night time, though, we needed to find a middle-ground between our art direction and functionality - namely, keeping the atmosphere of a dark night while making sure people could actually see while playing.
We ended up creating a separate light to follow the sugar glider, keeping him and his surroundings lit regardless of the environment around. Controlling both this light and the environmental lighting allowed us to guarantee players can see without breaking the nocturnal atmosphere!
So that's a bit of background on our lighting! Hopefully this cast a little light (😉) on some of the work that goes into building this natural world.
Let us know what you'd like to hear about next! We'd love to share more behind the scenes content as we near the final stages of development.
~the AWAY dev team