I actually liked the shadows, to be honest.
I think some lighting won't really hurt... or maybe some baked ambient occlusion.

I'm just not a big fan of this look where all the walls have the same brightness. It kind of takes away that 3d-effect.

Thank you for your reply man. Please take a look at this video, I'm just playing around with 'fog_end' value:
GAME_PROGRESS_WIP_02

Edit: yes, I know that it's too 'dark' actually I'll increase 'fog_end' value, made this video to show the basic concept.

Greets!

As a way to make your levels dark it's pretty cool!

The flickering of the light (when you're not shooting) is a bit too much for my taste, I would keep
effects like this a bit more subtle.. but that's just a minor thing and my personal opinion

However, it might be a bit more flexible if you used global light for the level's brightness and a pointlight at the players position.
But it doesn't really matter which way you do it.

I could do that, but as I'm trying to add some old school taste into this (aside from hellish pixelated style), I decided to try it with fog, and it seems to be not that bad to my taste. As I've mentioned in 'edit' of my previous post, the way it's shown on the video is too 'dark', here how it actually may look like at the end:
I increased the 'fog_end' value, so it's a bit more 'brighter' now. For dark levels this would be the way to go I think! Maybe I could add some horror, jump scare elements into the game? Thank you for you feedback man!


Edit: maybe I'll just go with simple 8 bit zombie shooter? With lowered saturation, like this:

What you think guys?

My best regards!

No problem, nice to see how your project is progressing.

Edit: I like both, the 'normal' look and the desaturated one. Pretty much depends on the taste you want. You could also use lower saturation when the player is severely damaged, for example

That's a good idea. Thank you for your time man!

Sorry for drowning you in suggestions but theres a cheap, little trick for bringing out the shape of an unlit level a bit better.

Here's a quick example:


video

It's a simple effect that darkens a surface if you look at it at an angle.
The effect is set a bit stronger here so it's easier to see.

I like it, but it's just personal preference.

Thank you for suggestion (any of them are really welcome!), and it looks pretty nice, but too bad that I won't be able to implement this into my current pipeline by myself

It's basically adding
to a shader.

(edit: you'll need to calculate those two vectors but that is just as simple)

A tiny bit more if you want to adjust the intensity and prevent issues with negative results.
But that dot-product is the idea behind the whole thing.

I'll be happy to give it a try. But how and where in a shader do I declare 'vViewPixelDir' and 'vNormal'?