There are many, many engines out there that are more then capable of making a great looking game, but from my experience, the majority of this power at our finger tips goes untapped. There are are those games we look at and we absolutely love how they look, sometimes we don't even know why, and we strive to make something look similar, but cant seem to get it just right.

From experience, I can tell you that aside from level design itself, lighting is the most important thing in designing any 3D environment. Take the shot below as an example; the lighting in this shot takes an otherwise dull room and invokes a feeling of emptiness, even abandonment and completely changes the aura of the room.

The shot above was taken from the FPS Creator engine. What I found was that despite the complaints and limitations from some users, the engine is highly capable of creating a fantastic looking game. Now its obvious the above shot isn't the greatest looking in the world, but I had it laying around and it illustrated my point.

I think that it is also worth mentioning that to reproduce realistic lighting, sometimes multiple lights at multiple angles are required. I'm sure we'd all love if we could simply place 3D lights at the actual representations of the 3D light models and have it look perfect, but that is not always the case.

Now with all of this in mind, we have been having discussions and debates whether or not to add shadows and lighting into our current 2D project, Echo One. Although I do believe lighting is extremely important, it needs to be done right, if it isn't, it can have quite the opposite effect. As I mentioned before, I am new to the whole 2D aspect of game creation, so even simple things like lighting are taking some learning to get it right. We will be sure to keep you all updated on the status of the project though!

Moral of the story? Plan those lights out! And be sure to let us see your screenshots!