Hey, thanks a ton for the support and glad you like it.
The side edges of cast shadows won't have much softening in the current setup. You can get a bit more by lowering the shadow map resolution on the light engine object's variables tab. That will obscure things a bit and the bloom blur passes would then soften them up some, and increasing the bloom amount would add to it as well. They won't be the same as how they taper towards the far end of the shadow due to the current GameMaker shader implementation. Eclipse has a lot of custom solutions due to the 10+ year old graphics API that GameMaker uses. There is hope in the larger runtime update this year that I will be able to use newer techniques for Eclipse in that area.
For animated sprites I use this program: https://www.codeandweb.com/spriteilluminator
It was totally worth the price. You do not want to do it frame-by-frame of course, and sprite strips are better to do an entire animation at once. You can also do multiple images at once so that they all get the same settings. Just drag them all into the images panel and highlight them all (shift click or something). Then when you use the normal map tools like bevel and emboss it will apply to them all.
You can use light depth to place lights behind other things. I show it in this video
The ambient color needs to also have the ambient light value turned up to do much. In the next update I will be improving how the ambient light works along with adding directional lighting and there will be a larger difference in those settings.