So look, making who knows how many separate assets look like they fit in together is kind of hard, even with depth adding some immersion there’s always this kind of collage type feel, a same-y-ness throughout. Kinda bland.

And how are we supposed to bring elements made special for completely different areas throughout the map without making a whole new colour swapped asset to make it fit the surrounding colour temperature and palette?

Just look at this set, pick the odd one out.

Well 2D lights in unity are super helpful. Yeah they’re supposed to only be for bringing light to a scene but I used them to essentially add an overlay filter on separate areas, giving to variety to the environment and getting some versatility in assets.

Check out this before and after.

Tthis is a pretty tiny area in the map, but you can already see the slight gradients and how much nicer things blend in with each other. The change in colour is because I don’t just use plain colourless lights to get things working together, I add a whole lot of colour to these lights.

Here’s a plain, unlit bunch of leaves and moss.

Here’s the same moss lit with a plain white light.

Here it is again with a slightly dim, saturated red light as filler, and a smaller, brighter yellow light as highlight.

And here it is with a deep blue light as filler and bright cyan light as highlight.

Adding colours to lights really lets us transform the environment to just what we want it to be.

Of course this trick is only supposed to be the an addition and not the base of out asset making, this is only as a finishing touch.

Unless the light is a concrete and key feature of the environment, like here. Look at these pretty god rays.

Easy effect to achieve, unity lights can be shaped pretty quick.

At this point I would show a screenshot of the entire area like in my last post, the one about adding depth to our 2D game, but at this stage I say you instead download the (as of writing this two days away) demo and see the place for yourself!

Also I kind of lied somewhere in here, I won’t tell where. Maybe in a new post.

• Gran