Ideas for lighting a 2.5d game like terraria?

News & General Discussion
1

I am in the early design (prototype) phase of our next game and I have come to a bit off a road block with the lighting.

The game would be 2.5d sidescroller with worlds designed like terraria. What I mean by that is that the player would need to go from outside in fully lit environments to deep dark caves with almost no light.

Furthermore, I would like to have tiles be lit like they are in terarria (you can see into the ground a bit but it quickly fades to black).

I first thought using 3d lights normally and putting up invisible shadow blockers to block the directional light in caves would work but how do I do the light bleed into the ground so that you see a few of the tiles?

What are some other ideas, assets or speculations?

2

I believe the way you do this is to loop through each tile to see if there is a tile above it, if not then increase the ambient level of the tile. The ambient level could be based on the average level of the surrounding tiles.