Lightmaps using Blender and Gdevelop

11/4/2025

Todays News will dive into the techniques and thinking behind the games look and feel. We have a lot to show about whats been happening for the past couple weeks. Lots of cool art and insights on game development.

Visuals

The Backrooms Deathmatch game is still a work in progress. As we keep developing the project further I want to share some insights on major milestones. As you may of read here on this website, we use a game engine called Gdevelop. The game engine features some amazing features. With visuals being a staple of the backrooms, we tried to think of how to tackle the look and feel of the liminal spaces within this game engine.

The Maps

Gdevelop is limited to a scene editor, but does not yet feature a Z axis full 3D view. While it is possible to build maps within the program. The level of detail we want to achieve is not possible without using an external application.
Blender being a free and powerful tool became the first choice. The plan would be to model maps within blender and port them over to the game engine. Simple right?

The only catch to this process is collision. Gdevelop has some good collision options for 3D but none that use a convex/hull option.
The solution to this is to rebuild the collision within gdevelop using cube objects.

Lightmaps

While solving the map modeling process might be an easy fix, the lighting for each map became a tricky problem. Backrooms locations feature a realistic approach to lighting to convey a sense of familiarity and nostalgia in a empty location. This is important for the game. Otherwise the game would just be Deathmatch...

One solution was to use dynamic lights . A common way to light games now days, but can be more taxing on systems and GPUs. Gdevelop being relativley new to the 3D scene made it seem like dynamic lighting and the performance drop it brings to the application, where not favorable.

The idea of using an older technique called lightmapping seemed promising. Lightmapping is a process in where lighting from an application is "baked" (or stamped) onto a texture or other model data. This is similar to "Vertex Lighting" but can retain more data from lights like direct and indirect lighting.

Blender Cycles proves to be a great pick for realistic lighting. When the lighting is baked the outcome is perfect and fits very nicely into Gdevelop without any concerns for performance.

(two comparisons of lighting; left is dynamic and right is baked lightmap)

In summary... a major milestone has been reached when it comes to the enviroments of the game. The lightmapping technique was hard to figure out between Gdevelop and Blender. But will prove useful in making the game look and feel very liminal

-lightmaps can bake water caustics on surfaces-

I have considered writing and producing a video on the whole process but it will be a while as work on the project is speeding up. For now we set our eyes on improving this process and finalizing some of the enviroments for the game.
-PM

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