This is my first blog that I am posting about our game development. I am a designer and artist in the group named Cyclops and we are developing a 2D shooter game called Echo. Echo is a game about a moth who is searching for its children in the dark. The player plays as the moth mother as it transverses around in a dangerous dark environment with other harmful insects. We use light, for navigation, in the form of berries which is obtained throughout the game.
For this week I had been working primarily on the background and the powerup which is the aforementioned berry. I had started with the berry. The color chosen for the berry was yellow since I wanted it to radiate bright warm light. Since it was going to be a light source it needed to glow. I Had to try a few stuff to make it have a glow like feel to it. It was tough not to make the berry look like a point of light. In the end I added a bright yellow color in the background to give it a feel at it was a glowing object while still making it distinct enough to see that it was a berry. I also increased the brightness of the color in the middle of the berry to show that it was indeed a light source. Initially it was too bright when put against a dark background so I toned it down till it looked satisfactory. The end result was this fine looking berry:
So after this was done, I imported the file into Unity for testing purposes. Our team’s programmers had made a script for a light source which I then applied to the berry. That gave it an actual glow and it looked really good thanks to the extra background color I put in at the back of the berry. But due to the extra light a lot of the details of the berry was lost. The texture was barely visible. I might tone down the brightness again for the berry in the future but we must first playtest other features before tuning anything else because right now it works as it is supposed to.
Game Development Blog: Echo 