Hello friends, my name is Jana and among other things, my responsibility has been creating the lighting for The House of Tesla. I’m here to give you a peek into my take on the general workflow.
As you may have gathered from the previous devlogs, creating assets and assembling them into a playable chapter requires complex collaboration across the whole team. But the work doesn’t stop once the environment and gameplay is all put together in the game engine - this is where lighting comes in to unify everything into a cohesive visual experience.
My favorite role of lighting in games is creating the mood and visual narrative of the environment. A lighting workflow always begins with a clear idea of what kind of atmosphere a scene should have - a base color palette, the time of day, and even aspects of the story will drive the decisions behind initial blackouts.
Once we’re happy with the mood, we can start adding some fill lights and accents to brighten areas that need it. Top priority in this stage is to ensure overall readability and guide the player through deliberate placement of highlights and shadows.
Lighting is all about slowly building up in layers and trusting the process - even the most subtle of tweaks can greatly contribute to the final feel of the environment.
Finally, when we’re finished with the fill and accent lights, we can zoom in on key areas of the scene and add detail lighting. This is where we make sure to put focus on all the beautiful assets created by the 3D artists, catching all the reflections and hand-crafted detailing.
And, of course, we push the player’s eye toward visual cues and interactive parts of the level.
Then, the lighting is thoroughly examined during gameplay testing and iterated on. Once we can’t think of any more improvements, it will leave my hands to be optimized and properly implemented into the game.
Lighting up the beautifully crafted world of The House of Tesla has been such a rewarding journey. Thanks for taking this quick behind-the-scenes dive with me! There’s more where that came from! For now though enjoy this glamorous glow-up of our demo chapter, which I had the honor of contributing to.
Jana
3D/Lighting Artist
Blue Brain Games