Check out this breakdown by Percy Legendre on creating dynamic 2D lighting.
Back in 2020, a Game Developer at Half Human Games Percy Legendre shared an extensive breakdown of lighting creation in the studio's game Dwerve, a Zelda-like action RPG with tower defense combat. The article was published at Gamasutra and from it, you can learn a lot about Legendre's Unity workflow, how to work with dynamic lighting in 2D games, and what additional plugins you might need for your Unity indie games.
Half Human Games is a small indie studio composed of Percy Legendre and Peter Milko. Legendre does programming, game design, writing, and even art at times. Since there are only 2 people in the studio, sometimes they have to come up with creative ways to make their game look and feel unique without investing too much time.
"Dungeon crawling through dimly lit dungeons with dynamic lighting sets the mood and makes the environments come to life. It further immerses the player in the various cave biomes that exist in the game world," commented Legendre on the necessity of dynamic lighting in the project. "Our goal was never to stick to the strict "old-school pixel art" with pixel-perfect cameras and limited color palettes. Our goal, in addition to invoking nostalgia with SNES-inspired pixel graphics, is to immerse the player in a deep fantasy world. Adding dynamic lighting helped us accomplish this."
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