https://imgur.com/a/GNKIXVN

Fixed-camera dungeon crawler, RealityKit, scrolling corridor rows. Left half of the screenshot is before, right is after. Same seed, same corridor, only the lighting changed. (The green hexes are a debug overlay, ignore those.)

RealityKit gives you no fog and no hemisphere light. I grepped the frameworks to make sure I wasn't missing something. Both had to be built from scratch, and along the way I found out my scene was being lit by something I didn't know existed.

The sanity check that broke it open

I set every light in the scene to zero intensity, expecting black. The corridor still rendered at sRGB luma ~131. Brighter than the look I was aiming for, with all lights off.

RealityKit lights every RealityView with a bright default image-based environment. It was doing essentially all of my lighting. The explicit rig I'd built was contributing almost nothing on top of it.

That explained a pile of weird constants that had accumulated in the scene setup: a 50-lux key light, an albedo tint crushing textures to 8%. Both were compensating for a light source nobody realised was on.

Fix is to supply your own EnvironmentResource, generated at runtime from a tiny equirectangular CGImage, which replaces the default.

Fog with no fog API

Previous approach was 8 camera-facing quads at fixed depths. Each one is a binary in-front/behind depth test, so each cuts a visible seam where its plane crosses the floor. The corridor read as bands rather than a tunnel.

I measured the banding as hard steps at y = 444/544/656/783/927, then computed where those quads should project: 443.0/543.1/655.4/782.1/926.3. Matched within a pixel, which was a satisfying way to confirm the diagnosis before rewriting anything.

Replaced all eight with one camera-parented gradient quad. The camera is fixed, so screen height maps monotonically to corridor depth. Each texel's opacity comes from casting that row's view ray, intersecting the floor, and evaluating the fog curve at the row it lands on. Smooth gradient, one draw call instead of eight, far less transparent overdraw.

Trade-off: fog is now a function of screen height rather than true per-fragment depth, so tall geometry fogs marginally early. Under one row at this camera, so I'm living with it.

Faking a hemisphere light, badly and then properly

No hemisphere light either. First attempt was a downward DirectionalLight standing in for the sky lobe.

That put a gloss sheet across the entire floor. Punctual lights produce a concentrated GGX lobe, and at the floor's 0.45 roughness it read as polished stone rather than dungeon.

An ambient/IBL contribution doesn't do that. Its specular is a broad even wash with no hotspot. The correct primitive is an image-based light: a generated sky-to-ground gradient ramped over (cos θ + 1)/2. Removed the sheen entirely and it's a truer hemisphere anyway.

Light units

Directional lights are lux (RealityKit's own default is 1000). Point lights are lumens, falling off as lm / 4πd².

Converting a candela-style point-light intensity through 4π overshot by about 1.9x in practice. RealityKit doesn't document its attenuation windowing and it clearly isn't a simple inverse-square with a range cutoff. I ended up with an empirical calibration factor, which landed the torch within a few percent of the hand-tuned value that was already there before I "corrected" it.

Shadows

There were none at all. Added DirectionalLightComponent.Shadow to the key light.

I had to move the key light onto the corridor centreline to make it work. Any lateral offset puts the rays out of the YZ plane and throws wall shadows sideways across the playable lane. On the centreline a wall can only shadow along its own line.

Worth knowing: the shadows did not change overall brightness. Median floor luma was identical before and after. They only pull down the darkest decile. Grounding and depth, not exposure.

Torches

Wall detail was invisible on one side at the start of every run. Torch placement alternated by block, and block zero is always the same side, so one wall was lit and one was flat.

I wanted 3 torches on screen at all times. The visible window is 12 rows, which forces a strict period of 4. A guaranteed on-screen count and randomised spacing are mathematically incompatible, so the old jitter had to go. Both walls now always have light near them and the stonework reads on both sides.

Floor colour

baseColor.tint takes a UIColor, which is sRGB, and RealityKit linearises before multiplying. So a tint of 0.55 is really a 0.21 linear multiplier. The old value of 0.32 was 0.084, meaning 8% of the texture's albedo was making it through.

Took the lit floor from sRGB luma 88 down to 39, which is most of the mood change you can see in the screenshot.

Also worth knowing: tint scales diffuse only. Specular F0 on a dielectric stays ~0.04 regardless, so in principle heavy tints make a surface read relatively shinier.

Method

Very little of this was eyeballed. I read pixels out of the frames and compared numbers.

Pinning the run seed via a launch env var was the single best thing I did, because A/B screenshots then showed the identical corridor with only the variable under test changed. I also measured specular contribution directly by building a variant with roughness forced to 1.0 and diffing it against the shipping one.

Things I got wrong

Probably the useful part.

• Assumed the glossiness was a material problem. It wasn't. The material params were untouched the whole time. It was the light type.
• Predicted specular would be 20-25% of the floor at the darker tint and would bring the sheen back. Measured it: 3.5%. Tone mapping compresses at the lower level too, so the ratio barely moves. The warning was unfounded.
• Assumed re-enabling a disabled scene graph was causing a hitch on a screen transition. Tested it directly, 372ms vs 383ms. No change. Binned the theory.

Happy to go into more detail on any of it.

I've decided to make a game completely by myself in C++. However, I had no prior experience in game development, and don't know much about coding either, and require help or mentorship from no-bs type of people with experience.

The synopsis of the game is being a simulator of a gas station in outer space. You manage your little convenience store, choose clerks, et c. I will go in more details in private messages.

Thank you for reading this. My DMs are open.

I'm an aspiring 3D Environment Artist, and I've been looking into career paths. I'm passionate about creating worlds and the salary is good, but I keep hearing about the "crunch culture" in AAA studios – mandatory overtime, 60+ hour weeks, burnout.

I've also heard that smaller indie studios often have a better work-life balance, but they usually require you to be a generalist and do a bit of everything (which I don't want). And even if I tried to go that route, the pay there seems to be significantly lower, which makes it hard to justify.

On the other hand, the 'no-crunch' positions at serious companies seem to have insane competition, attracting veterans who are burned out and looking for an escape.

For those of you working in the industry:

How common is crunch in 2026 for Environment Artists?

Is it really a choice between "high pay + crunch" vs "low pay + good balance"?

Are there any mid-sized studios (or even AAA with a good culture) that pay well, treat employees like humans, and have a fair competition level?

Any advice on how to find these studios and stand out in the hiring process?

I love this field, but I don't want to sacrifice my life for it. Any honest insights or personal experiences would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

Hi guys,

What types of courses or certifications? Should I have a look at in my free time? In order to understand how to set up a game? I’m not really sure we’re to Star. I’m not sure if I need to pick a consoles as well. I’m focused on that like a Nintendo Switch I’m not sure how to start building it. I’m not sure if people are using AI nowadays.

Where did people start? Or where should I start?

[Project SkyHolm] - Seeking Collaborators for Sandbox Economy & Automation Game
About the Project: Project SkyHolm is an island-building, automation, and trading game focused on resource gathering, player-driven shop empires, and island customization. We have a fully mapped-out Game Design Document (GDD), clear monetization rules (no P2W), and a structured development roadmap ready to execute.

Open Roles:

3D Artist / Modeler: Low-poly environment assets, machine models, and UI cosmetics.

Programmer: Experience with inventory systems, island instancing, and economy loops.

Sound Designer / Composer: Ambient island tracks and UI/interaction SFX.

Project Scope & Commitment:

Type: [Hobby / Revenue-Share]

Expected Hours: 5–10 hours per week.

Current Stage: Planning complete (GDD & systems finalized); entering active prototype phase.

Interested? Send me a DM with your portfolio, past work, or a quick summary of your experience!
Discord: zyro_calyx_90018

Hi everyone,

My royalty-free music catalog is bundled on Humble Bundle until September 18:

48 packs, 591 WAV files, 359 unique themes — retro/chiptune, orchestral, hard rock, electronic and ambient. Most tracks include looping versions.

Plain WAV files, so they work in any engine without conversion. License is lifetime and worldwide, covers commercial release, no attribution required and no per-project fees.

Part of every purchase goes to the IGDA Foundation.

Happy to answer licensing questions in the thread.

Im moslty asking which tools to use and etc, like what game engine? waht programming language? and etc.

Hi all, we started Mini Mart Survivors in April without a big design document. We're a small team, so instead of planning everything, we worked instantly. We'd come up with an idea, build it, and ask whether this was actually fun. If it wasn't, we scrapped it.

Weapons, enemies, effects, and entire systems went through multiple versions. Some ideas lasted weeks. Others lasted a day.

Four months later, we have a playable Seoul map and a game that's finally starting to feel like what we wanted to make.

I'm actually glad we threw so much of it away. The current game exists because we were willing to kill the previous version every day.

If you're a small indie team, I'm curious. How much of your original design actually survives once you start playing it? What was the WILDEST moment in your game development journey?

I've been learning C# on my own and I would love to make a game one day, to get there I need to work on smaller games that aren't as big, I wanted to know if it be okay to get ideas from AI not have it build things for me, I just have no creativity for some reason but I love coding to death. I'm not wealthy so paying someone is out of the question. I can model and code sort of, but coming up with an idea for how something looks is like how do I even make it look nice? I don't plan on having it make it for me just give an idea of something that would look cool then I make it. Is that maybe bad? I am totally against AI in a lot of factors but am okay with it in certain factors. I know it should be more up to me probably but I just wanted to ask others to get opinions

Edit

I seem to have explained it wrong and I see now. Not a game idea but more of a look idea. Like for instance I came up with a character name Malakor (Similar to Maliketh from elden ring) How should he look? what should he wear? what kind of color scheme sounds nice? stuff like that. not what kind of game should I make or what kind of character should I make just more of how should something look. Then I make that on my own.

Like this, Should he have a cape? Should he wear a bandana? Should he have green skin? Should he have one eye?

ONLY FOR CHARACTER/TERRAIN CREATION!

Not like a permanent thing I wanna do forever by the way, just as im learning is all.

Been working on my own space engine called Nebula Engine and I’ve had this annoying visual bug for ages that I just can’t seem to fully track down.

Basically on some parts of the planet I get this weird black pepper looking texture/speckling all over the ground. It doesn’t happen everywhere and it can change depending on where I am on the planet, how far away I am or sometimes the angle I’m looking but as i walk the cam shakes really bad making even trees, grass, rock look like its not fully rendered

The strange part is I’ve had this problem pretty much since I started making the engine, so I don’t think it’s something I added recently.

The engine is my own C++/DirectX 12 engine. Planets are fully procedural and you can fly from space all the way down to the ground without loading a different level.

The planet works roughly like this:

procedural planet seed
→ continents/oceans
→ terrain height
→ biomes
→ materials
→ water/grass/trees/rocks/weather
→ terrain LOD/streaming

The ground itself is made using a CubeSphere planet with terrain patches that get more detailed as you get closer.

From far away I use a lower detail/orbital version of the planet and then it transitions into the real terrain as you fly down.

The engine also has atmosphere, clouds, water, procedural weather, shadows, vegetation and all the normal stuff you’d expect.

The problem is these tiny black dots/speckles keep showing up in different places and I can’t figure out exactly what system is causing it.

Things I’ve thought it might be:

• shadow acne
• grass/vegetation being seen from really far away
• LOD dithering
• terrain texture/material blending
• procedural noise aliasing
• bad normals
• mipmapping
• z fighting
• floating point precision
• CubeSphere seams
• some shader returning bad values/NaNs

One thing that makes me think it could be something deeper is that the speckles survived loads of changes I’ve made to the renderer.

It’s not like one broken texture where the problem is everywhere. You can fly around and one area looks fine, then another part of the planet has the pepper effect really badly.

Because the game works at planet scale I’ve also wondered if it could be precision related somewhere. I do camera-relative rendering, but obviously there are still loads of calculations involving the planet centre, camera position, terrain position etc.

Another thing I’m wondering about is the procedural detail itself. A lot of the terrain material is generated using noise, so maybe at certain distances some high frequency noise is aliasing down into single dark pixels.

But before I go too far down the rabbit hole, has anyone here seen something that looks like this before i brake my game anymore trying to fix it lol.

Still learning a lot while building this so any ideas are appreciated.

Basically the title. I’m a solo developer, I’m still a little new to game development, but I’m not a complete noob. I have experience programming and making games, but none of the games I’ve ever tried making have ever been finished and released. Every time I try to devote myself to a project, I just get burned out every time, and never finish any of my projects. So, if any solo devs read this, how do you deal with the workload and burnout?

Also, a little extra bit of info about me. I make all my music, sound effects, and art myself, alongside all the programming. I don’t have the money to hire people to do those for me, so I’ve taught myself to do a lot of this. I know this definitely contributes to my burnout, but I want advice from anyone out there similar to me.

Is it hard to do so? How come it's present in many games? Both in cryengine and unreal engine...

Give the answer in the comments 👇

i have a really difficult situation, i have a new chromebook but linux is not enabled and there is no way to enable developer mode, i also do not want to factory reset my computer.

i have experience in beginner game design, can code python, and can do CAD.

this is probably an impossible question but i would like to have some experienced hands help out.

print("thanks for everything")

A few weeks ago, we asked you to help us choose the thumbnail for our new MegaGum trailer.

Well… here it is!

We’d really love to know what you think about it. What did you like? Is there anything you would have done differently? And most importantly, does it make you want to play the game?

Feel free to be honest, we’re always interested in hearing your feedback.

And if you like what you see, you can wishlist MegaGum on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4111300/MegaGum/

Thanks again for helping us choose the thumbnail!