After not having played around with Mimic for many months, and with GameCity coming up (now in the past), I started thinking about how to solve the overlap issue and how to move the project forward. I was suddenly struck with the idea that maybe changing the project from an isometric 2D game to an isometric 3D would solve it with some simple code redesign. I set to work, and after roughly two nights worth of coding and testing, I had a working 3D version of Mimic. It worked! The overlap issue was gone!
The first step was to step up the scene.
This involved some very simple 3D modeling and scaling apropriately.
Testing with the existing code, the characters float away, which won’t do. Some tweaking to the spawn code when in 3D mode fixed this.
The next step was to add shadows, which was suprisingly hard. The environment is 3D, as is everything except the characters, which are 2D sprites. After looking everywhere I got some advice on twitter from the tag #gamedev. Apparently, if you go into Debug mode in the Unity editor (top left next to the lock icon), you can then set a sprite to cast shadows and receive them.
Tweaking the strength of the sun, we get:
This is basically all the work I did before GameCity. More updates will be coming!
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