Sprite Lighting

Hi,

I have several sprites in my scene that have been made from a texture atlas. Is there a way for these sprites to be affected by lighting?
The only way I can think of is if I make separate materials for each sprite and apply that material to a Plane mesh, but that seems awfully convoluted and I loose the ability to use texture atlases, also inefficient if I have say, 20+ different sprites.

I’ve seen this: Lighting 2d Sprites - #2 by Robotpencil
But I assume this is using materials, as they talk about gloss, normal and diffuse maps.
I’m not looking for per-pixel lighting, just something that makes them dark if there’s no light near them.

It would also be awesome if there was a way for sprites to be affected by fog…