Afterlight’s light and shadow system: how it started as a sketch

The first version didn’t work

At first, light and shadow were only aesthetic. The player, Lumen, moved through areas that were more or less dark, and the lighting changed the atmosphere, but it didn’t change anything about how the game was played. It looked atmospheric. But while testing it, we realized there was a problem: if Lumen moved just as well in darkness as in light, the entire premise of the story — that light and shadow are opposing forces that weaken each other — wasn’t being felt through the player’s hands, it was only being read in a text.

That was the first real lesson of development: if the mechanic didn’t reflect the relationship between Lumen and Umbra, it wasn’t a mechanic, it was decoration.

Going back to the sketch: light as a force, not a filter

So we did something that was difficult for us to accept at the time: we let Lumen literally feel weaker the farther away he moved from the light. Not just visually — slower, with heavier animations, with less room to react during combat. The divided area where our world exists (the light zone, the shadow zone, and the middle zone where neither of the two races can fully live) stopped being just a setting and became the character’s own health bar.

And so that this change in state wouldn’t just be an abstract debuff, we added the streetlights: small sources of light scattered throughout the level that the player can activate to recover strength. The first time we tested this, in a very early level where Lumen wakes up weakened after a collapse and has to turn on a single streetlight to be able to continue moving forward, we realized it worked: turning on that light no longer felt like a tutorial task, it felt like a small physical victory.

The twist that gave everything meaning

The real change came when we decided to reverse the rule as the player progresses. At the beginning, Lumen has total control: he moves with ease, the light strengthens him, and a weak, trapped silhouette, Umbra, can barely keep up with him. But the further the journey goes into shadow territory, the more that relationship reverses: Lumen loses agility and strength, while Umbra regains it.

We don’t explain it through dialogue. We explain it through the characters’ own movement. And there is a very specific moment in the level design where this becomes confirmed as a gameplay mechanic, not just background narrative: at a certain point, Lumen cannot move forward alone because an area is covered in dense darkness that hurts him just by touching it. The only way to continue is for Umbra to absorb that darkness for him. The first time we tested it in the prototype, with programmer art and zero visual polish, it already felt like the heart of the game: your companion protects you from what would hurt you, and vice versa.

Where it is now

Right now, we are fine-tuning how this state change is represented throughout the game’s four zones, from the completely illuminated area where Lumen begins, to the absolute shadow territory that Umbra belongs to, without it feeling like a numerical health bar, but rather like something that can be seen and felt in every jump, every hit, every extra second it takes for a character to react.

We are still iterating. Every level test makes us adjust the pacing of this reversal a little, and we would rather make it feel right than rush to have it finished.

We’ll leave you with a real question we’ve been asking ourselves internally this week:

Do you think a player should notice earlier that something is going to change, or do you prefer the surprise of losing strength to catch you as you progress, without warning?

We’re reading everything you share with us. This is still being built, and your ideas genuinely help us.