Using 2D daylight assets to create a night level
Changing the lighting in hand-drawn art is a challenge. While in 3D games you can simply modify the light, there is no such thing when using 2D assets. In our new game Swords & Soldiers II all the level assets have their lighting drawn in. Of course you can ask the artist the redraw the image with different lighting, but that costs a lot of additional time and texture memory. We managed to re-use our daylight textures to create convincing nighttime levels, so today I would like to explain the tricks used to achieve that goal. Today's post is all about the artistry of Ronimo artist Ralph Rademakers. He uses images drawn by Adam Daroszewski* and Gijs Hermans to decorate the levels in Swords & Soldiers II. Ralph keeps surprising me with the unexpected tricks he manages to pull off with our internal tools . *By the way, note that Adam works as a freelancer these days. He drew most of the level props in this post and you can see some more of his amazing work here . There is ba...