Whilst I'm the eternally anxious sort that will never be happy that the games we make are in a state to release, I'm proud of what the team has managed to put together with the resources available.

Hopefully we'll have many more development adventures to come.

I solved this by rendering the character off screen then applying that render to a sprite, which can sort with the scene.
From that render I also pull the real-time normals from the character and use that for the 2D lights shading.

Not advisable for your first 3D project? 😅

In June '24 I experimented with 3D characters. There were some... teething issues.

Doing 3D in a 2D world presented some sorting issues. Also 3D models don't work with unity's 2D lights, which we were using with sprite normal maps for directional shading.

At first we tried 2D animations, in Feb '24.
Character animations rendered out to sprites, for 8 directions (although we just did 5 and flipped horizontally).

Being a '2D studio' this is what we were most comfortable with, but it'd be a massive asset headache to deal with and not very sustainable.

By Dec '23 we decided to try out free moving players within room sections, which was an obvious improvement. But this would require animations that we weren't initially planning on.

We're releasing Eyes of Hellfire in early access this week.

To quiet the internal screaming of "OMGITSNOTREADYTHEBUGSTHEBUGS!!" I've been looking back at the progress of development. Here's the first video of a playable prototype I have saved, from Oct '23.

A lot has changed but the core is there