Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

FIGURE 3-1
World light at full brightness
C H A P T E R 3
flat and emotionally unattractive. The lighting doesn’t really serve any purpose other
than a practical one—we can clearly see our way around.
As a workflow point, I actually leave the lights on “full-bright” when doing the
layout and basic construction phase (described in Chapter 2). Compare this very simple
example with Figure 3-2, which shows the exact same room with a single light
added; its brightness factor has been altered. This room transfers much more feeling,
and is only beginning to transfer a mood factor. All we have done is change brightness
values! This breaks up the uniformity of the single flat light that we started with.
We have so much more control at our disposal than just brightness factors.
Cutting-edge game engines are starting to feature dynamic lighting. This opens up
entirely new ways to use lighting in games. Lighting will soon have an even more immediate
and direct effect. Dynamic (or real-time) lighting allows characters and objects
to interact with light and to cast shadows as they would in the physical world—
not by precalculating the light and “faking” shadows to imply a real light source.
However, dynamic lighting, as you might imagine, is very graphics processor-intensive.
It requires substantial graphics hardware assistance. Very soon, however, it will be
used in many games.
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Lighting, Texturing, Particles, Effects, and Audio