66 - How Our Lighting Works

[matt]

Neverending Nightmares has a very unique look, and part of the reason for it is the way we approach lighting. This video shows behind the scenes of all the elements that make up our lighting effect.

[gagaplex]

Very interesting. I was wondering how that worked, whether it actually calculated the lighting (especially on the character) or was pre-animated or something. I have no clue about programming. But I'm honestly a bit surprised this is about "shaders", because when I hear that I think of 3D-games and whatnot. Please don't spare the tech-updates if something else interesting comes up.

[matt]

There are plenty of tech updates we can do. We actually do a bunch of sophisticated tech stuff even though it's a "2D" game. While shaders were originally designed for 3D graphics, but as graphics card technology advanced, they can be used for a lot of really interesting things for 2D/3D graphics, as well as more general purpose stuff like physics simulations.

In Retro/Grade, we actually created a "stateless" particle system that ran as a shader that computed every particle ever frame from seed values. This allowed us to make time go forward and backwards because we could compute the effect at any time. (Many simulations can't be easily reversed on computers because of limitations with computer numerical processing.