@fubarpk Yes there are shaders have been shared by the community on the forum but they don't perform well some of them hit the performance significantly even on my desktop and some don't even compile due to an error in the actual shader code.
Having real-time dynamic lights and shadows indeed not practical in case we want to target low powered devices, this is why would be nice to also have some light weight static/fake solution.
With the new renderer we might also need new shaders that I'm sure the community going to provide but since TGC rewrite the renderer from scratch I think it would be the best time to look in to this and do something about it since most competitors out there do offer some sort of solution for 2D lights out of the box either dynamic or fake or both.
Engines that I know to offer some sort of solution out of the box if not a light object but at least the means to create a fake one through blending sprites and layers (some also offer community made plugins but I don't count that in this list):
Unity
Godot
Construct
001
Fusion 2.5 (Windows only)
GameMaker Studio (require heavy coding in GML but no shader required)
Duality
Monkey2
Some of these even support normal maps out of the box. Sometime it is very unfortunate AppGameKit doesn't offer any solution one that also work on mobile. As you can see, there are plenty engines out there that do offer something out of the box so I think it would be extremely important for Studio to do as well. If not light but at least some way to blend sprites and by that I don't mean setting transparency. In an other topic someone asked similar and people was suggesting to change transparency, that is not blending. Blending means we can subtract part of a sprite from a part of another and also able to set strength of subtraction so portion of sprites can be transparent instead of make it completely invisible. With this we could play around and create lights of our own but currently when you change transparency it is effect the whole sprite. Just a quick note before someone mention changing transparency as a solution.
I would be really happy with something 001 has to offer. A shadow layer effect the entire screen and some light objects that being subtracted from the shadow layer in the given shape, strength and color. We can also change the color and strength of the shadow. It is not that heavy on resources and can provide some nice results. If you need anything better than that yeah must use shaders but not every one can and interested in coding shaders. I can deal with gameplay but no shader unfortunately and would be nice to have something out of the box even that much 001 has to offer would be great.
Thanks.