Survival-Strategy Game Highland Keep Now Features Real-Time Voxelized Lighting

Technical Artist and Game Developer Kacper Szwajka, who first drew our attention in early 2024 with his detailed insights on procedural object placement in Unity, has shared a new update on Highland Keep, a survival strategy game set in medieval Scotland that blends third-person combat with traditional RTS-style castle-building.

According to Kacper, the game now features real-time voxelized lighting through the integration of HTrace: World Space Global Illumination, a dynamic software-based ray tracing system from IPGames that enables fully dynamic diffuse indirect lighting with infinite light bounces in Unity and now powers the game's custom nature renderer and terrain.

He also revealed that every tree in the game is fully interactive, allowing players to chop or destroy them, with lighting responding instantly. As for performance, Kacper stated that the game currently runs at around 45 FPS on an RTX 2080 GPU and is expected to hit 60 FPS without issues, though the team had to introduce partial voxelization to help maintain performance.

Earlier, the artist also showcased a custom solution that allows interaction with millions of scattered objects across the terrain:

And prior to that, he demonstrated a neat Unity-powered tool he created for building terrain in Highland Keep:

You can stay updated on Highland Keep's development process by following the game's Twitter page. Don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.