Bringing light into the project

So today I have played around with the lighting concept of the game. As the title suggest I want it to be scary and dark in some way and I think one way to achieve that is the correct lighting. I have tried out some basic concepts using a Sprite Mask yesterday but the effects haven't been what I had in mind for the game. Initially I thought I might have to switch to 3D to use the Unity Light Engine properly but I started searching for tutorials and examples of what I had in mind.

During this process I stumbled upon the lighting in Stardew Valley which seemed to be very nicely made. It had something creepy about it and I wanted that for my game. After some more digging I found very great tutorials not only on the topic of lighting in 2D Unity Games but also on how to use Tilemaps (at this point I had been dragging and scaling some of the tales into the game "raw" I know shame on me... but I'm just learning I hope you can forgive).

I learned quite a bit today that made my life waaaaay easier. But the most important (to me) was that I finally got the lighting righ!!! Here is a little picture with some free dummy sprites by Unity that I will be using until I feel confident enough to make my own:

I might have to tweak a couple things but right now this is good enough to fiddle around with my concept and to see if this concept of hiding some of the map in darkness might be fun for a horror game. 

As far as I can tell now it feels great to explore the map like that and to not be entirely certain what lies behind this darkness. I think I will keep it and build on that. Maybe Ill expand the vision a little more but Ill have to see what first game testers say about that.

At the end I wanted to issue a couple words to you (the reader of this weird blog/devlog whatever thing) I noticed that I got quite a bit of views even without advertising this anywhere. Thank you for sticking around and reading all this. Seeing this right now made me happy and motivated me to keep going. So drop a comment and maybe give a little feedback or just say hi so I can get to know you :)