Creating the lighting for The Thinking City was a tricky task taken by myself as I had never done anything with lighting before in any game engine. It was also hard to find good resources that were similar to the kind of lighting environment we wanted for our game. Some of the challenges I faced were: 

1. I had no experience with any form of game engine lighting
2. I didn't know anything about the different lights you could use.
3. There was not a lot of tutorials on the kind of lighting I was trying to achieve.
4. I was unaware of just how much impact lighting has on performance

To address these issues I managed to scrape together a couple of tutorials from YouTube and one on Udemy as well as get access to some Unity developers scenes to see how they used lighting within their scenes.

I find myself to be a lot more of a piratical learner than a person who picks things up by reading or seeing them especially when it comes to things like developing in unity or programming. To this end I have amassed a pool of video resources/online courses that I can use to help me learn the engine as well as help get the best lighting with performance consideration in mind. Below you can find a link to the resources that I am using throughout development.

• Wilmer Lin, Udemy course on lighting, https://www.udemy.com/course/lighting-in-unity/learn/lecture/10938968#overview
• Brackeys, Lighting Tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnG2gOKV9dw&t=15s
• Brackeys, Realtime Lights, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwm98VdzD8s
• N3K EN, Unity Lights, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bmmh_btSCU
• Unity documentation on Lights, https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Lighting.html

Keywords searched: Unity, Lighting

Throughout the level there are lights that run along the hallways. We wanted to maintain an eerie atmosphere so populating this hallway with too many lights would take away from this feel. To combat this I put a sparse amount of lights along the hallway in a few select places so that the hallway has a low level of light throughout with a few places that are a bit brighter.  To get the lights to the level of brightness we felt didn't take away from the atmosphere it was a matter of playing with the Lumen levels of the lights until we were happy with the result. 

These lights are put into the level to give the impression that the area has fallen into such a state of disrepair that only a few of the lights are still functioning. They also brighten up areas that the red pipe lighting doesn't quite reach at times. There are also ground lights accompanying these lights. The ground lights point into the air and are set to a much lower Lumen so that it fills out the area a little more. The point of these ground lights are to make it look like the Hall lights are filling out a much larger area than they actually are and that the light is trailing off as it moves away from its source.

You can see several images below of the hallway and the low level lighting with sparse brighter lights at key points.

There are gratings that run along the hallways in our game. These gratings contain glowing red pipes that are carrying hot steam throughout the facility hence why they are glowing. We used these glowing red pipes in the game as we wanted to use red lights along the hallway to subconsciously bring out a felling of fear and dread. These red lights trail up the walls surrounding the pipes to give a sinister look to the environment. This was a very nice way of giving the hallway a bit more light without taking away from the eerie and sinister look we wanted to give the space. 

You can find some of the research we did on how red effects human minds here : https://www.sciencealert.com/does-colour-really-affect-our-brain-and-body-a-professor-of-colour-science-explains

Below are some images of the red lighting for the pipes and how it trails up the walls illuminating the area.

When developing the lighting for the robotics lab we wanted it to be a bit brighten than the hallways as this is an area of the game where there is a mission based VR interaction and we wanted the player to be able to clearly see what they are doing. This is due to the fact that after the VR interaction a keycard is dropped to the floor that is crucial to the players progression through the mission. To this end I increased the Lumen value of the lights in this room so that the area is a lot more visible than other sections of the game. 

Below you can see some images of the lighting within the robotics lab.

The gravity room is another one of our main VR interaction areas for the mission of the game. This room has a lot of objects floating around and on top of all that it's centerpiece, the gravity generator, has a light blue distortion effect around it. The visual effect itself does not emit any kind of light so I put a point light in the center of the effect so it bathes the room in a blue glow that compliments the visual effect. I also put in some standard lights to add general vision and to make sure that the player is able to see in the room once the generator has been turned off.

You can see some images below of the gravity room.

The chemistry room was going to contain a VR interaction at one point during our plans but due to time we had to reduce the scope of our project and while the room got populated with objects and lights it did not get the VR interaction. The original purpose of this room was to have it as dark as possible but to have scattered glowing test tubes about the room that the player could use as a makeshift glow stick to see their way around the room and overcome the obstacles within. The lighting for the room was completed before the scope got reduced.

You can see an image below of the how the chemistry room looks in game.

At the end of our game we have a teaser for the rest of the game before the game fades to black. In this ending event the player is walking down a dark corridor that has a dim blue light shining in from a group of windows suggesting the area is underwater. This area is deliberately dark with only this blue light as we want to attract the players attention to this area for the big reveal. Blue lights have also been proven by research to reduce heart rate and make people feel comfortable which is another subconscious feeling we want the player to have in this situation before the big reveal rips them back out of this space.

You can see an image of this hallway below and I will also discuss more about the big reveal below. 

The second part to the ending of our game is a massive eye opens up in the window bathing the hallway in its intense yellow stare. This creature is the one hinted at throughout the level but is the players first sighting. We had the creatures concept nailed down early in the development but until now we were not sure if the creature fit in this level. However we decided that it was a good idea to show a small piece of the creature as a teaser to the player. The yellow light emitting from the creatures eye was decided on to give the creature an other worldly feeling and to really announce it's presence to the player. From then on in the full game the creatures presence can be distinguished from its yellow gaze.

I used realtime lighting for the eyes gaze as baking in this light would stop it from bathing the hallway in a yellow light. 

You can see an image of the light from the eyes gaze below.