I posted a bit of the preliminary work for this earlier but not the actual effect, so here's how i am dealing with perspective and associate problems in riptide manor!
In order to look nice when the camera is facing down from above, character sprites are angled upwards by around 45 degrees. Unfortunately... this means the sprite will clip directly into nearby walls, since i'm not using layering or transparent sprites.
The solution i had used in the last version was a custom shader that took in a number of spherical inputs and carved out an appropriate 3d space in the walls, but that approach had some limitations in terms of how i was passing the points into the shader.
I'm sure somebody more experienced with Deep Shader Magic could have made it work better, but i had a new idea: using an extra camera, i render a circular gradient mask to a viewport texture and cut out the walls using that instead.
This has the main advantage of being completely unlimited in how much of the screen i can mask out, making it much more scalable with large numbers of enemies (though i doubt that will ever be a problem) and even usable for fancy effects!
I have a couple ideas for things to use this for, and the general approach could make for some interesting visual effects. I could even modify it to use all three colour channels for different masks!
Maybe something that fades out the floor for room transitions....