Great use of the theme :) I love the idea of using the shadows to determine what the ingredient is. It’s nice and simple and easy to get the hang of. Well done for your first game jam.
Would love to know more about your shadow casting system, purely out of curiousity; I think that effect is really cool.
Thanks!!
The main shadows (bottles and solid ingredients) are just done with Unity's lighting system, with shadow quality bumped way up.
As for the colored liquid shadows, I actually had to cheat a little, using several colored spotlights with spot angle, color, and intensity set just right. The bottles are invisible 3D models that cast shadows, with a bunch of invisible sphere colliders inside of them. The spheres act as a very rough, first-order approximation of a liquid, so when you shake the bottle the spheres slosh around, roughly like a liquid would. If you then track those spheres with spotlights as they move around, it makes for something that looks like the shadow of a transparent liquid. But if you take the spotlights and point them at a random sphere every frame, it gives a shimmering quality to that liquid-shadow!
As my own harshest critic, I have to say that it looks a lot more convincing when the number of spotlights is close to the number of spheres in the bottle. In editor, I was using between 50 and 100 lights to point at 100 to 200 spheres, but WebGL restrictions made me cut down to just 7 lights for the same number of spheres. But all-in-all I'm happy with how it turned out :)
