Lighting Effects for Mobile Games

Adapting games to the miniature screens and limited processing power of mobile phones is quite a challenge. To accommodate these technical limitations, mobile games are often twodimensional (2D), tile-based, and seen from above. Such games rarely present much creativity with respect to dynamic lighting. Textures are merely plastered onto the tiles. A recent game release has, however, shown that effects such as dynamic light sources can spice up a mobile game of this type quite a bit. In this paper we carry the idea of dynamic lighting effects for tile-based 2D games even further. In particular, we present simple and efficient techniques for shadows and fluctuating fog which can greatly improve the gamer’s visual experience. CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation—Display algorithms; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Color, shading, shadowing, and texture