Light Lessons

Hello, loves! With a reasonable design, reasonable changes are generally reasonably easy. So keep the design reasonable. Anyone in the dungeon game business knows that the “right light thing” is ray-tracing, so that your torch only casts light on tiles that a straight ray of light can reach. Some corners and crevices won’t be illuminated until you get positioned correctly. That scheme also allows one to hide behind things, avoiding ranged attacks, etc. Yesterday’s little experiment took a few lines of code to illuminate a room as soon as Dot enters it, and it leaves illuminated any room that has ever been illuminated. My Product Definition Personality (PDP she/her) wanted more of a discovery experience, not a full-on lighting experience. But even if they wanted ray-casting or shadows or whatever they’d call it, I might still do the simple thing we did yesterday. Why? Because it would show progress, it would give us all a sense of the effect, and it would very likely take us to most of…