Being a roguelike-hybrid, one of the many challenges faced while developing Wartorn with a small independent team was figuring out creative ways amplify replay-ability and prevent players from feeling that they were repeatedly seeing the same (or very similar) environments over and over again. Several art pipeline tools were added to accommodate this, including a variety of procedural terrain generation and automatic object placement Houdini HDAs, however none of those tools were intended to address level lighting.

The goal here was to create a data-driven, all-in-one "Atmospheric Controller" that would automatically be added to all levels and serve as a wrapper around all of the different lighting components that would typically be manually added (a directional light, a skylight, a fog volume, and so on). Building upon these components, a small handful of parameters was blueprint-exposed to allow level designers to broadly control things like time of day, fog density, and color palette. For more granular control, custom data assets could be authored and piped into the controller to allow identical atmospheric settings to render uniquely on individual maps.