2D sprite shadows transparency mixing

mimosky

Hello everyone, I'm a trying to get into godot (as a dotnet programmer without any significant gamedev experience).
I want to develop a simple 2D top-down game prototype using tilemaps, sprites etc.

I would like to use a tilemap with three layers:

ground (grass etc.),
trees, objects,
drop shadows (sprites using alpha transparency).

It works and it integrates well with y-sorting and my sample character, but there's an issue. The shadows transparency is adding/mixing, so the result looks like that:

I tried to resolve this by custom shaders (probably impossible without the stencil buffer, but I may be wrong) and the CanvasGroup node (which doesn't work well with tilemaps and y-sorting). Right now I'm starting to think it's impossible to achieve what I want. Can I ask for some advice or help?

mimosky

So, any thoughts or advice?😉 How do you handle this type of shadows in your games?

xyz

mimosky If the ground is just one large texture, you can use darkened cutouts of that texture, without semi-transparency. You'd just need shader to automatically offset the texture position for each shadow, depending on its world position.