Another day without much to report, even less than last night thanks to lethargy and a couple unexpected events. Nevertheless, I am going to talk about lights!

Last night, after some feedback, I adjusted the properties of the existing lamps. Previously, they had a small range and a very high intensity (15!). I turned the intensity down to 2 and doubled the range, resulting in a much softer light covering the same area with no decrease in visibility. (And now you can see the track texture again!) Increasing the spotlight angle to cover more area, however, came with significant impact to the level's performance. Personally, I like the effect of alternating light and dark strips while approaching the city, but if it's not well-received I may have to find a way around it, although I'm unsure if I can.

Tonight, I added arch lamps to the highway. The arch seemed like a nice way to evenly cover a large area with light, though I still needed to tune the lights themselves. The arch comes with three point lights, so increasing the range too much resulted in them bleeding out to the sides, and reduced performance. I settled on increasing the intensity just a bit, and also marked the center light on each arch as "detailed" (the player will only be on the right side of this highway). I suspect as I continue adding to the track and add more decorative lights, I will need to keep a close eye on framerates, and I will definitely have to do a major light cull before this level is published.

Speaking of adding more to the track, I find that the less time I spend on it, the more I become obsessed with details, since they are the easiest to mess with in small time frames. The path forward for me is to aggressively pursue the level layout before attempting to detail anything, even to the point of leaving things nearly broken for the sake of having a completed track. For instance, at the current speed, the on-ramp track dumps the player just shy of an arch, which they will crash into if they don't dodge it quickly. This is an obvious issue, but if I don't push past small adjustments like those, I'll be stuck in development hell, tweaking tracks and fiddling with lights all night (or 30 minutes out of the night). Just like any good drawing, I need to know what the overall thing looks like before small adjustments actually become useful.

I'm going to wrap it up here for tonight. I hope hope hope I work on this level during the day tomorrow, but clearly I need to take some larger steps before that happens. (Plus, the Splatoon 2 Splatfest will take up the evening...) See you tomorrow~