Studio Foreground

Foreground Light

In private development

Lighting and atmosphere for RPG Maker MZ maps, set up by eye. Foreground Light by Studio Foreground is a standalone editor plus a set of runtime plugins. You place lights, shadows and effects over a snapshot of your map, see the result straight away, and then play the same setup in the game.

A late-night shopping street in the Foreground Light editor. Coloured light points placed by the map's author sit on shop signs, windows and an arcade entrance, and a red neon sign glows against the dark buildings.

Light and shadow over your map

The editor opens a snapshot of a map and lets you build its lighting on top:

  • Lights and shadows that spread across the map grid, with shadows that characters cast from a sun direction you set.
  • Hard-edged lighting: an optional banded, stepped look across the whole map, for a pixel-art style instead of smooth gradients.
  • Props: your own images placed at any pixel position on the map.
  • Cloud shadows: drifting shadows made from your own cloud artwork.

An effect stack for every map

Each map gets its own stack of atmosphere and post-processing channels. You turn each one on and adjust it separately:

  • Weather and drifting particles: leaves, petals or mist, limited to the zones you choose
  • Haze and fog
  • Light rays
  • Colour grading and tone mapping: brightness, contrast, saturation, gamma and colour balance
  • Bloom
  • Lens effects: lens flare, chromatic aberration and focus blur
  • Vignette and colour veils

Presets can change during play, with a smooth crossfade triggered from an event command.

Know what an effect costs before you ship it

Effects look good in an editor on a fast computer, and then slow the game down on a player's laptop. Foreground Light shows a cost for each channel, measured in the editor on your own map at game resolution. You can see which effect is expensive before it reaches a player.

The Foreground Light Tuning panel. The bloom channel shows a measured cost of about 0.7 milliseconds and its own Calibrate button; a channel that has not been measured yet shows a question mark.

We tune and check the effects on a dedicated low-end test machine, with integrated and entry-level graphics, not only on development hardware.

Built for working creators

  • The editor interface is available in English and Chinese.
  • Lighting setups are saved as data that the runtime plugins read. Your maps and events are not rewritten.
In private development

Proprietary software. A further update, adding editing history, crash recovery and side-by-side look comparison, is in development. See the roadmap.

Interested in Foreground Light? Contact us.