Devlog #1 – Building a Modular 2D Lighting & Weather Toolkit for Unity URP

Devlog #1 – AtmosphereFX

I’ve been messing around with Unity’s 2D Renderer for a while now, and one of the things that’s always bugged me is how awkward it feels to set up lighting and weather that actually looks good. You can get there eventually, but it usually means juggling particle systems, hand-tuned colors, and a lot of trial and error.

That’s where this toolkit came from. AtmosphereFX is my attempt at pulling all of that into one system that just works. Instead of reinventing the wheel every time a new project needs rain, snow, or a proper day/night cycle, I wanted something I could drop in, tweak, and move on with.

Right now the toolkit has:

• A manager that handles the whole day/night and weather system.

• Profiles for lighting that use gradients and curves, so transitions feel natural instead of just flipping a switch.

• Profiles for weather that handle the prefab, audio, and intensity all in one place.

• A randomizer that can cycle through weather on its own so the world doesn’t feel static.

• A trigger script that makes it easy to hook weather into UI buttons or in-game events.

The demo scene has rain and snow set up, plus UI buttons to toggle them. I’ve also been running the lighting profile in fast-forward so I can actually see a full day/night cycle play out in a couple of minutes. Watching the light fade into evening and then drop into night while the particles keep rolling has been pretty satisfying.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Getting particles and lights to play nice with the 2D Renderer took a lot of fiddling with sorting layers and groups. Performance was another concern — phones don’t love heavy particle effects, so I had to start thinking about scaling intensity and pooling instead of just blasting a thousand snowflakes onto the screen.

From here, I’d like to add a few more features: lightning strikes, some fog layers with parallax, maybe even a simple time/calendar system to anchor the day/night cycle to real sunrise and sunset times. But for now, the basics are solid and it’s finally at a point where I can share it.

That’s the snapshot for this first devlog. AtmosphereFX is about making 2D lighting and weather in Unity a whole lot less painful, and it’s starting to get there.