Hey all! Kite here!

Thought it would be fun to look at some old screenshots I had lying around of the game’s early development.

For this Flashback Friday, I’m gonna focus on how I arrived at the “look” of the game. There might be some technical terms thrown about, but I hope to make it understandable!

Be warned, these are not pretty! This stuff is from when I was working on the project completely solo - and was still working in Hollywood by day. That is to say, I had no idea what I was doing.

One of our earliest challenges was finding the right visual style - what would the game look like?

By default, Unreal Engine uses a static lighting system that allows you to gain performance by baking lighting and shadows into texture information. Essentially, that means you can get realistic lighting (including bounced light, ambient occlusion) without killing your frames per second, because it only needs to calculate it once.

Building lighting was a pretty slow and painful process, as was optimizing every mesh to have enough lightmap UV resolution to make it not look awful. Though it usually still looked pretty bad.