Lighting and Post Processing

Paranormal Pursuit implements lighting techniques and post processing effects to create an immersive experience that presents the right visual atmosphere relating to its genre. Lighting was taken very seriously, as it was part of the core gameplay.

Lighting

Paranormal Pursuit implements the use of several 2d lights in conjunction with a global light, this technique was used to make the game very dark while still maintaining enough lighting to ensure the player could see. Dark and dim lighting was an important part of the games mechanics as it provides a spooky atmosphere and the horror factor in the game.

Global light - The global light affects the entire map, this lights intensity was set to 0.008 which was done to   make the whole map very dark.  

Spotlights - The game is comprised of several spotlights which are set very very dull but bright enough to illuminate big areas of space. The was done to create a sense of volume and 3d to the game.

Asset Lights - The game implements lights not just for the  map but for assets as well, currently the player has the function to turning on  a 'torch' or 'headlamp' via a key press. This is used with a toggling script that toggles on and off the light via a key press, the 2d light is set up  as a child of the Player object. Another light is the light attached to both animated   TV  objects, the light attached to the TV is light blue in color which is the natural color of a TV.

Post Processing 

Paranormal Pursuit implements the use of post processing effects in conjunction to the lighting of the game to create a visually atmospheric scene. The game currently uses a vignette and bloom post processing effect. 

Vignette - The vignette was added to shade off the corners of the screen, this was done to limit the perspective of the players vision. It manipulates the players perspective into a tunnel vision like state, because the players vision becomes limited, the player does not know what to expect while exploring the map, this was done on purpose to create an  edge of the seat  like experience.  

Bloom - This simple post processing effect works really well  with the dark global light as it gives colors a glow, specifically the players bright red shirt  glows a little when illuminated with a bright light. 

Challenges

Most of the challenges related to implementing the use lighting and post processing was directly related to  the project not being created using the correct render pipeline when I started it. Because of this initial mistake I had a bit of trouble getting the lighting and especially the post processing to work. I was initially trying to use the post processing package to implement post processing, however I learnt later that it does not work in conjunction with URP, instead of using the post processing volume component I used the  correct component to use with  URP which was the volume component.