Salutations Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to another end of week devlog for Dead Heat!

This week, the Hell's Kitchen area was finished and I got to dive into my favourite element of level design; the lighting.

When we moved the new area into the full project, I began examining each part for where would be best to put lighting and how much lighting could we afford to loose. Noir is naturally sparse and smart with its lighting. We would need to ensure that the player knew where they could go and what they could do without bathing the entire area in nothing but light. It had to be similar to the alleyway, but match 

The alleyway scene had a brighter sky and moonlight shining past the buildings. This was to show that the alleyway was located in the more run down older parts of the city, between the financial district and midtown. Areas known as 'dead zones' where few people live.

For Hell's Kitchen, the sky is almost invisible due to the light pollution and tall buildings that jut out of the city. The Kitchen had to give a much more oppressive atmosphere, as if you had strayed into some asphalt jungle where moonlight doesn't go past the canopy.

The primary colour of the Kitchen is sodium orange. Older style lights even for our time but plentiful enough to replace the newer broken ones. I want the colour to be present in all shots but not overpowering to the point it detracts from the beauty of the environment.

Jay Sanchez has done outstanding work with this area, especially with the Playwrights House; Sonja's lavish apartment building prominently displayed at the centre of the Kitchen. It perfectly encapsulates the blend between Art Deco and Neo Gothic styles. The style had to stand apart from the older, more rundown modern (for our time) style of building that surrounds the apartment building.

The lighting in the area also needed to indicate points of interest without it being too explicit. For example, from even the furthest angle, the player will be able to see a flashing light and a bright purple neon sign at the end of the street, indicating points of interest.

I will continue to fine tune the lighting, there are still some things that don't look quite right or could look better, since lighting is such an important part of the game I will do all I can to ensure each area it lit perfectly.

This weekend, our new programmer was busy working on the new Lip Sync system, which should be ready within the next couple of days! This comes at the perfect time since we just completed one of our first proper recording sessions with Tasch Ritter (Sonja Vargas) and Shannon Hobby (Lilith Troy). So soon, you will be hearing their voices come out of our two detectives mouths!

Thank you for reading our end of week devlog!

As always, we will keep you all updated regularly as updates are added to the project on Twitter and our Discord of the Dead: https://discord.gg/r8rQv6h

And remember, if you like the project and want to support us, please donate to the project's patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/DeadHeat

Every little helps keep us going!

I will also be getting back into streaming on twitch and uploading the streams to our YouTube account to give you all a chance to hang out, relax and play some games with me. I will be streaming tonight at around 10pm GMT so stay tuned!