This looks awesome! Can't wait to play the game. Also, quick question, can you explain how you made the checkerboard shadows in Godot? Thanks in advance.
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Thanks!
The shadows are done using an orthographic camera that views the level from a top-down perspective and it follows the ship as it moves through the level. The camera is inside a viewport so that I'm able to access what the camera sees as a texture. The viewport is setup to have a transparent background, and things like the ground in my levels are on a different visibility layer so that they're not rendered by this camera, only the main objects such as the ship, enemies, scenery etc are. I then use this texture mapped onto a flat plane positioned just above the ground (also on a different visibility layer so the top-down camera doesn't see it) and I use a shader to draw the checkerboard effect. Any part of the viewport texture with a transparency < 0.5 is discarded, and anything greater is where I draw the checkerboard texture, which is just a repeating 8 x 8 texture and it's drawn using screen space UVs.
Hope that helps, let me know if you're unsure of anything :)
I am reading this amazing explanation 227 days later haha :^). I understand everything except for one part: "I then use this texture mapped onto a flat plane positioned just above the ground (also on a different visibility layer so the top-down camera doesn't see it) and I use a shader to draw the checkerboard effect." I would think if you simply drew the checkerboard onto the flat plane using the flat plane's UVs that it would not line up with the player camera well, right? So do you place a special placeholder holder color there like green screens do and replace it with the dithering on a "post processing" shader on the camera so that the dithering uses the camera's UV? Such a beautiful game and I this creative use of viewports really interests me