Programming Light

Light behaves in a complex way through coloured glass. Most games don’t even attempt to try and simulate that, they needn’t… But my game ‘GLASS’ hyper-focuses on just one coloured window. Just as my previous game KAMI, which revolved around a single sheet of paper, with GLASS I also went way deeper into the mechanics of light passing through the glass.

The fascinating thing is just how convincing and beautiful the result can be when you follow the real mathematics, of light bouncing, refracting, and it is diffused and transmitted. This blog post is a deep dive into how I implemented these effects in the shader code for GLASS, and how the result just ended up looking “right”.