- Create a new layer for Light Areas.
- Create a new camera matching your main camera for drawing lights, and set this to only draw the Light Areas layer (Culling Mask) and clear to a solid black colour. Set the main cam to not draw the Light Areas layer. Set the new camera's Draw Order lower than your main camera (typically -1).
- Add a sprite to every light source, alpha blended. Use a graphic for the area light effect, so just a soft round spot. Set its layer to 'Light Areas'.
- Create a RenderTexture asset in your project panel.
- Assign this RenderTexture as the Target Texture for the Light Area camera.
- Create a quad that matches your main camera.
- Create a new material of type Particles/(Mobile/)Multiply, set it's texture to your RenderTexture and apply it to this quad.
- Position the quad between main camera and everything else.
Quite often things can take far longer than you expected to implement. Adding doors took a while! And then the result is hardly anything. So it's a rare satisfaction to savour when something as significant as a major visual upgrade is achieved in such a straight forward way!
I'm now going to make it a 'proper' system with parameters for light size, brightness, bit of animation, etc. this way the lights can become part of the game. How about one level where the only light sources are on the monsters attacking you...?
UPDATE:
An issue came up with the scaling of the quad playing nice with the aspect and zoom of the camera, causing the lights to drift when the camera was moved. Just needs a little maths to scale the quad, and to use a square camera drawing to a square quad. This code is added to my camera control script that also handles zoom, backdrop scaling, etc.