Lighting Update
Hi everyone. Remember when I said no more updates until I returned from Japan?
Before getting into the lighting changes, I want to quickly address a bug from the previous update.
In the last patch I increased the melee hit radius to make close-quarters combat more forgiving. While this improved the overall feel, it also made it far too easy to accidentally hit mines, explosive barrels, and fuel tanks during fights. On stations with the Zealot trait, where enemies drop mines on death, this could result in unavoidable explosive damage when finishing enemies with melee.
This has now been fixed.
Lighting Improvements
This update includes lighting improvements across 40+ rooms.
The main goal was to improve clarity and readability. In some environments, enemies were blending into walls, shadows, or background geometry, making combat harder than intended. I’ve lifted the overall ambient light and rebalanced contrast to make enemy silhouettes clearer without flattening the atmosphere.
Some of the later station types were particularly dark, so extra care has gone into Robotics, SPEC OPS, Varangian, and Scrapper environments.
Boss areas were also revisited, including Boss 2 (Skugs), to improve overall visibility during the fight. The door that spawns reinforcement enemies is now properly lit, making it easier to read and respond to during combat.
I couldn’t realistically show a screenshot for every lighting change made in this update.
Many of the changes are intentionally subtle, focusing on small lifts to visibility and brightness.
In the shot below, the change is subtle, with a slight lift to colour and contrast on the back walls.
Boss Clarity
To further improve readability during boss fights, dedicated spotlights have been added to Skugs (Boss 2) and The Warp Titan (Boss 3), alongside improvements to skin and texture visibility so they stand out more clearly from their environments.
These fights should now feel clearer without losing their sense of scale or threat.
Brightness Slider Fix
The brightness slider has also been reworked.
Previously, it was hooked into Unity’s ambient lighting settings, which caused unintended colour shifts and inconsistent results between scenes, especially in darker environments. The slider is now connected to post exposure instead, resulting in more predictable behaviour, better consistency across environments, and no colour distortion.
This was largely down to how the settings plugin handled ambient lighting. The new setup is far more robust and closer to how players expect a brightness slider to behave. Give it a try and let me know how it feels.
Other Fixes
Fixed walls on the Prison floor that enemies could path through
Reduced volume of the shield-up SFX.
Reduced volume of the credit pickup SFX.
Fixed broken textures on Athax and Varangian doors where a colour palette UV map was visible in-game and broke immersion
Final Notes
While this is a significant step forward for overall environment lighting, I’ll continue refining rooms with every update. If you spot a room that now feels overly bright, washed out, or still too dark, feel free to drop a screenshot in the Discord, it’s incredibly helpful.
As always, if you run into any bugs, please post them on Steam Discussions or Discord. I read everything.
Now I really am off to Japan for two weeks.
Cheers,
James