Cave lighting and paper monsters
I did try adding some lights to the 2d cave environment, and I kinda like the look. I wanted to sooner or later add lighting effects to some attacks and such, so I guess it’s for the best I found the motivation to look into and learn the basics now( thanks for the idea).
I do want to keep the lighting fairly subtle and let the 2d assets I painted to speak for themselves though, if that makes sense. Also if I make the shadows more prominent, the background art starts looking flatter, which I don’t want. And I didn’t plan for this, but the shadows help with understanding what counts as an obstacle: if it casts a shadow then it’s an obstacle. So that’s useful.
Installing the plugins into Unity to make these 2d lights work was easy, theoretically, except that like always there were a few extra steps missing from the official documentation. So I had to extract that forbidden ancient knowledge from debts of reddit, random 30 minute long youtube videos of which 5 seconds were useful to me and 4 or 5 random forum sites I never heard off. At this point I assume this sort of thing is the intended method.
I also painted some paper monsters from the sketch earlier as well as a couple others. I haven’t put them into the game yet, but here is the artwork. The names starting from the left: Crumple Stichija and Ancient Knowledge Stichija, Paper Stichija in the middle, Fold Stichija and Origami Stichija on the right.
I do like the idea of calling these fantasy themed monsters SomethingWayTooSpecific+ Stichija ( elemental ). I will probably continue with that naming convention for these, it amuses me.