[ANTSANTS]

I'm kinda tired of the "cone-of-vision" mechanic and associated visual effect common in modern 2D games. In traditional 2D games, being able to see things that are not visible to the player's avatar is, IMO, a significant part of the charm. Not being restricted to a realistic viewpoint lets you become the larger-than-life hero of cartoons and cheesy action movies that does impossible things like leaping into a room full of bad guys and shooting them all before they have a chance to react, or "sensing" someone behind him and dodging the arrow at the last second. When you make a 2D game that tries to "realistically" limit the player's view, you're getting the downsides of both 2D and 3D games. It says to me, "I really wanted to make an FPS but I don't know how."

No criticism is intended towards OP's game; the "un-stealth game" is a different and interesting idea. I'm just throwing it out there for those dreaming up yet another top-down cone-of-vision stealth shooter to chew on.

[kevingadd]

You seem to have an unnecessarily narrow view of games and how they're constructed.

Try out Mark of the Ninja and tell me they were 'just trying to make an FPS'.

Picking an appropriate perspective for a game involves a lot of tradeoffs. While certain mechanics are most appropriate for certain perspectives (top-down 2d, isometric, first-person 3d...) a general approach to 'visibility' is not one of them. Visibility (or an approximation of it) applies to AI in almost every action game type, regardless of perspective. Whether they can see you or not is an essential consideration for creating convincing enemies, and AI allies need to know whether they can see foes.

You can also extensively use vision cone mechanics without having anything to do with an FPS. Classic games of the Rogue variety (i.e. nethack, angband...) all leverage vision cones and line-of-sight despite the fact that they predated 3D games of any kind.

[ANTSANTS]

I hang out in some indie/amateur game dev communities and it's like everyone and their dog is making a top-down stealth shooter with the exact same effect, the exact same mechanics, and the exact same "FPS in 2D" feeling. That's what I'm tired of, not 2D raycasted lighting/shadows in general (yes, I thought of Nethack while writing the grandparent comment).

[ahoge]

Well, it's not like the unlit parts must be completely black.

Having some dynamic lighting does not mean that you must make it part of your game's mechanics. It's perfectly fine to do that kind of thing just for polish.

[kevingadd]

It's usually quite important if you want to create AI that behaves convincingly in a 2D world. The previous game I built using a 2D lighting system used it explicitly for this (other than making the environments look cool, of course) - the same geometry and light source data that lit the environments and produced shadows also determined whether enemies could see objects at given locations and whether you had hidden yourself by vanishing into the shadows or behind a given surface.