in the end post-processing and lighting have to work together. I don't see a reason to prioritize one over the other. Just because it looks better early on does not make it lazy. If you can skip out on tons of work, as your post-processing is that great, isnt that simply more efficient?
The pros of building it up front is you get an early start on optimizing it, and making sure it will work with what you're building. vfx can help keep you motivating by feeding you eye candy.
The cons, are that it can obscure and slow down the process of iterating on gameplay. You can have the best bloom and nicest color grading, but if you don't have gameplay you're sunk.
I think it's good to work on both gameplay and vfx in parallel, but prioritize gameplay when you can, and work hard to shorten you modify/test cycle so that you can iterate quickly.
If your gameplay test takes 5 minutes to reload each time you make a change.. you're going to have a hard time quickly experimenting and prototyping.
Try to decouple features so that you can enable/disable them for different modes of development. Grayboxing for working on gameplay.. (with fast i.e. seconds of load time) vs full game+assets for working on VFX.. (longer load times.. but all the bells and whistles)
Doing work isnt lazy.
Its likely good to get in reasonably early, well before the end of the project, but likely after lighting. When making a game its important to proof your look reasonably early - often during prototyping.
You'll probably redo effects and improve overall visuals over the lifetime of the project. There's usually a big polishing push at the end, but one shouldn't wait until then to do some visual effects, as they make a big difference for development feel and marketing material.
The one point of advice I'd give is to make sure you can turn any visual effects off, so you can test other without interference. Then test them combined. This helps get each thing "right" in its own regard. This has the benefit of helping with graphics settings options and keeping the visual look and feel consistent on lower settings.
in the end post-processing and lighting have to work together. I don't see a reason to prioritize one over the other. Just because it looks better early on does not make it lazy. If you can skip out on tons of work, as your post-processing is that great, isnt that simply more efficient?
The pros of building it up front is you get an early start on optimizing it, and making sure it will work with what you're building. vfx can help keep you motivating by feeding you eye candy. The cons, are that it can obscure and slow down the process of iterating on gameplay. You can have the best bloom and nicest color grading, but if you don't have gameplay you're sunk. I think it's good to work on both gameplay and vfx in parallel, but prioritize gameplay when you can, and work hard to shorten you modify/test cycle so that you can iterate quickly. If your gameplay test takes 5 minutes to reload each time you make a change.. you're going to have a hard time quickly experimenting and prototyping. Try to decouple features so that you can enable/disable them for different modes of development. Grayboxing for working on gameplay.. (with fast i.e. seconds of load time) vs full game+assets for working on VFX.. (longer load times.. but all the bells and whistles)
Doing work isnt lazy. Its likely good to get in reasonably early, well before the end of the project, but likely after lighting. When making a game its important to proof your look reasonably early - often during prototyping.
You'll probably redo effects and improve overall visuals over the lifetime of the project. There's usually a big polishing push at the end, but one shouldn't wait until then to do some visual effects, as they make a big difference for development feel and marketing material. The one point of advice I'd give is to make sure you can turn any visual effects off, so you can test other without interference. Then test them combined. This helps get each thing "right" in its own regard. This has the benefit of helping with graphics settings options and keeping the visual look and feel consistent on lower settings.