João Raposo - week 15 May

I've been making the skeleton code for the game entities described on the previous post, and mostly tinkering with creating a 3D to 2D pipeline, inspired by a post from one of Dead Cells devs.

I started by making a simple 3D scene with an animated character.

Link to all images

Then I developed a shader to outline and highlight the objects on scene.

I then tried different forms of downscaling the images in a way that preserved the pixelated feeling, and ended up with this.

Afterwards, I toyed around with generating a normal map from the rendered scene, trying to cram both the normal and the color into a single texture, but ended up just rendering two different frames, one for the color and another for the normal. 

In the end I end up with a 2D sprite with a built in normal map, that allows it to interact with the lighting on the rest of the 2D scene.

This way, we can do the character animations in 3D, which has a more natural and easier workflow than in 2D.