@beakman.studios: Heres a bit of a breakdown of our technique for making stylised shadows in Unreal Engine for our upcoming game Barrow and Blade! We wanted a way to create really punchy black shadows under the player and enemies to match the art style of our environments which are inspired by the work of Mike Mignola, which was something we weren’t really able to achieve with the default unreal lighting and shadow system. Our solution was to create a second simplified skeletal mesh of each character, and then use a material to project the vertices of this character onto the floor. We use the skeleton of the main character as a leader component to remove the performance implications of doing animation calculations twice for each character, and since we only really need the general shape of the character, the shadow mesh can be much lower poly! This technique gives us a lot of control over the angle and length of the shadows and we think it ties the characters into the environment nicely. We’d love to hear what you think in the comments, or over on our discord (link in bio) #indiegame #gamedev #indiedev #roguelike #creatorsearchinsights

Dark_Demon14 :

make it so that if you stand still, at a random time the shadow will wave at you

JP :

We did this on madden lol

ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ :

this could be a great way to implament your shadow into lore/gameplay applications

Glass Earth Studios/Game Music :

Looks amazing. Gonna follow to see how it all goes. 😀

Buzzyard🇸🇪🏳️‍🌈 :

I hope you do use the fact that it can move independent of a creature in some clever way. Like an enemy that attacks via it's shadow or something :) Seems a waste otherwise!

booelverp :

good enough yeh

visitingangel_official :

Very cool creative approach. Love the idea of the shadow subtly doing something different and making the player think “wait am i seeing things?”

Dr Calemvir :

so idea for a hidden mechanic. shadow secrets. at times your shadow may direct you to a secret, but only if you havent moved for a bit. . or idle animations. player character is idle for a bit and does their own idle animations, but rarely will they "notice" their shadow "lagging" behind and show an interaction

CuteSnaps :

Optimization nightmare I suppose. There's a shadow system for a reason

SUGOI :

Sorry this might be a really dumb question, but once you have your shadow copy, how do you have it react to the angle and lighting of the environment?

Pimeine :

Oh wow that's a cool idea!

Flawed Human :

steam page time yet? been wanting to wishlist for months, love this game 🤧

Hush Wood :

shadow is great, good job

⚕️ :

make it so there is a small chance that your shadow will revive you and like slap you to wake and say something epic like "shadows are created by light" or something kinda cool and nobody would believe that it happened when you tell your friends.

GlitchandGrind :

This is so dope!

Frog master :

This looks really cool, the style kinda reminds me of hades the rogue like

Ryan Wiley :

Love it. Need any voices for your game

T1MR :

smart!

Isaac :

Montgomery Hawk :

same in good old game Sacred Underworld on high graphic preset )))

KZHee :

it looks really nice!

Johannes Nienaber :

so the shadow can have a shadow?

Tsuna G :

It breaks perspective. only the sun or a Fresnel create a shade of that size. every other light should stretch the shade

bird :

This is the same technique I used for shadows in a Quake source port in 2001. I also added mirrors, fog, r_waterripple, and water fresnel effects.

grobax :

its cool if you do something with it. else its just ... whatever