left: image taken from an emulator with upscaling
right: image taken from actual console recording
seeing this technique made me suddenly fire on all neurons & realize i could do something cool with exactly 0 added resources...
normally characters in project astray use basic top-down circle shadows, because it covers all cases pretty well! the world is lit from the top down unless specific light sources are present.
i recently was super taken with the extremely sick (and took-6-months-to-develop) dynamic lighting system in sea of stars... i can't do anything remotely like that....
but i CAN do this:
disclaimer: contents in here are a test environment & don't reflect a final area
- it uses the existing character sprites AND animations, so it's 1:1 with no new assets
- drawing the sprite at different scales lets me do dramatic front & back shadows
basically it's swapping between two different shadows (set to cross-fade so it looks smoove) when you enter a 'shadow zone' where i define the new dynamic shadow length (changing the y-scale) and optionally, the rotation (for dramatic positional lighting.... rotation doesn't look as good as skewing or other deformation, but for some reason gamemaker doesn't allow skewing while also overwriting the sprite color).
so by setting up a series of these zones, i can activate positional shadows, and also make them more dramatic the closer they are to a light source.
again, nothing as impressive as sea of stars, but i had to share !
