Welcome back to our developer diary! Today, we’d like to shed some light on some more recent changes we’ve made to update the style of In Sink 💡 Let’s take a look at how our art refresh and new lighting system have combined together to complete our brand new look!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1858650/In_Sink/
If you’ve played our prologue, you may have noticed that the lighting differs from the recent screenshots we’ve been sharing of the game. This is because everything in the prologue is ambiently lit at ~95% brightness and virtually no shadows are cast, so a lot of the in-world lights that you see are cosmetic, aside from a select few spotlights that shine down in some parts of the level.
In order to make the lighting look more natural, we decided to switch to a real-time lighting system!
As you can see in the comparison photo above, in the prologue it looks as though almost everything is lit by default and there are a few spots, such as the areas directly below the in-world lights, that are especially bright. With our new lighting system, everywhere is a lot darker by default and only the lit spots are bright. On top of that, there are more lit spots in each level, they’re brighter, they’re at a wider angle, and they have smoother falloffs, which adds to the realism of the lighting.
We also decided to incorporate the use of light cookies into multiple areas of our levels. This has allowed us to produce the illusion of high fidelity lighting without the associated performance cost, as shown in the image below.
For the final touch, there’s now a post-processing stack that adds bloom to the lights and tone-mapping, which gives the lighting a slightly warmer temperature and makes the levels look a lot cosier.
In short, the combination of the art refresh and the new lighting system have come together to create a style that we hope you’ll love even more than the prologue!
Tune in to our next developer diary, where we’ll be discussing how we’ve been making some significant changes to ensure In Sink is more accessible for colorblind players. Want to meet other In Sink fans and challenge them to a speedrun in our prologue? Then don’t forget to join our Discord!
