Buddy’s Die In
Subterranean Studios
Lighting Artist & Level Designer, February 2024 - March 2024
Team size of 5 people
Buddy's Die In is a short, one month project. It is a Unity Engine horror game about a diner employee locking up after a closing shift. However, a monster comes out of the fog when they reach the door. The player, as the employee, must navigate the diner and find the coffee in order to escape their hallucinations.
The project was completed over a 4 week timeframe with a 5 member team.
An image of the kitchen area, with the top right displaying the area before a lighting pass.
An image of the dining area, with the top right displaying the area before a lighting pass.
Level Design
Images in the top right are before post processing and lighting. This scene utilizes baked lighting extensively, as that was all that our team needed in order to achieve the desired visuals. There is a small amount of bloom in the scene, as well as color grading and tonemapping to control the visuals better in this scene.
The level is themed around a blue/pink color palette, which also helps the game to feel much more authentic in its setting. The post processing sets the mood, with gloomy and unsettling options being chosen, like green color grading and other effects like chromatic aberration.
Lighting
Buddy’s Die in was designed around the player being able to loop and avoid a chasing monster. As such, the design of this level replicates old diners, and with it being a horror game, it also attempts to mimic a maze-like feel with the player always having options. The monster chases the player through winding corridors between tables and chairs, with the player being able to loop them to attempt to get away.
Beauty shots of the game in the diner section (the top row) and the kitchen section (the bottom row)
Project Takeaways
This was one of the first projects I worked on, and it was where I learned the baked lighting pipeline. I put a few lights in the scene, and the performance was quite bad. To improve the performance, I lowered the amount of lights in the scene to begin with. I then tuned each light’s attenuation radius in order to make the performance better for the remaining lights. I then baked a significant amount of these lights. I began this project with next to no knowledge, and I ended it with vast knowledge of realtime and baked lighting.
This project also taught me that level design can and should be a lot more complex than just one simple path. A good level contains several options to achieve the same goal, even if it doesn’t seem like it.