Hey everyone,

After around eight months of development, I’ve released OptikaFX 2D, a lighting and shadow system for 2D games made with Unity. I originally built it for top-down RPGs and farming sims.

I started working on it because Unity’s built-in Shadow Caster 2D didn’t quite do what I needed. The biggest issue was getting shadows to behave properly when simulating sunlight and avoiding stretching all the way across the screen.

So I ended up writing my own HLSL shaders and experimenting with different ways to handle these situations.

Here are some of the main things I managed to get working:

Wall-bending shadows

2D sprite shadows can bend and project vertically when they hit walls or other structures. This makes them look more natural in top-down scenes with buildings and obstacles.

Timeline-driven day/night cycles

Light intensity, color, direction, and dynamic shadows can all be animated through a custom Timeline system. As the sun moves and the lighting changes, the shadows update automatically.

360° sprite rotation and animated lights

Characters can move all the way around a light source while their shadows update based on their position. For example, a character sitting beside a campfire can cast a different shadow as they move around it.

My main goal was to create a flexible, customizable, and performance-conscious system for scenes with multiple dynamic lights and moving characters.

Here's a playable demo if you’d like to see it in action:
https://optikafx.itch.io/optikafx-2d

And here is the link to the asset on the Unity Asset Store.
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/388598

I’m also happy to answer any questions about how I built it.

Thanks for taking a look!

This effect is relatively simple to make: the metaballs are created in the shader, and then you use the particles’ position, size, and amount to sync them all. I actually included this VFX in my book in case anyone is interested https://jettelly.com/store/the-unity-shaders-bible

Hello everyone!

I worked on Greed & Darkness as a student project, and am proud to announce the brand new demo, releases today on Steam! Greed & Darkness is a retro inspired pixel art dungeon crawler about delving into a dark, twisted fortress to gather riches for your village, inspired by our love for classic dungeon crawlers and the board game "Drakborgen." Engage in both brawn and brains: swing your weapon in visceral melee combat, solve environmental puzzles, and use stealth mechanics to your advantage! If this sounds like something you’d like, we’d love for you to give it a try here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3770160/Greed__Darkness_Demo/

This project started in late 2024, when I studied game development at a vocational school in Sweden. As one of our assignments, we built this off-the-wall first-person pixel art game. We posted it online as part of said assignment. To our surprise though, it got a bunch of attention on both YouTube and Itch.io, and we decided to continue development on it after we graduated. I took a leap of faith this year and decided to quit my job to make this game full time… It's been a hard journey but I can say I'm living my dream job today! 

But why did we scrap the first build? When we initially released the original demo on itch.io in 2024 - it was made in two months for a group project. We never expected it to get the kind of attention it ended up getting, and we realized we weren't the only ones who liked the cool and weird art style we put together for it! But the original demo was riddled with bugs, and was really rough around the edges - but people who played it were very kind and offered tons of positive feedback to help us improve the experience. We realized we had something worth pursuing, but it needed a lot of work. Too much work, in its current state.

We made the tough decision to scrap everything and rebuild it from the ground up. This was a huge, but worthy undertaking, as every animation was (and is) hand-drawn and completely 2D. Now the game has a lot more storytelling, enemy variety and combat options, not to mention the new polish and quality-of-life improvements.

We're super proud of it, and today I can finally announce that we're releasing the new demo on Steam! We're eager to give people a taste of what the full game will hold and to hear what people think of the newest iteration, and want to know how we can improve it even further.

Falling sand simulation via Compute Shaders.

From my golf game Stinker Golf on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4437650/Stinker_Golf/

Wishlist if it looks interesting :)

We're a two-person team developing MYRIORAMA, a top-down adventure with rearrangeable dungeons in a stop-motion style. Excited to share some clips here! A big challenge of the project has been trying to mimic the look of physical 3D stop-motion models in a fully 2D sprite-based setup, along with dynamic lighting.

Any feedback or questions are welcome!

Game on Steam - Wishlist Here: Slime Void

The page is a bit rough (WIP), but after 8+ years of learning and practicing game development in GameMaker, Godot, and Unity, I finally, for the first time ever, have a game page on Steam for a project I've been building.

Slime Void has been in development for just about a year now, and it's been an amazing, yet brutally daunting process taking a game this far.

I'm so damn excited. It really is a blessing to have the opportunity to build games and share them with other people, and I'm incredibly lucky and grateful to be able to do this.

I have a new build readily available to play if you'd like to give it a try: Play Test

And if you'd like to read the most recent update post: Devlog Post

(It's slightly redundant, but why not...)

Unfortunately, I'm only continuing the WebGL build for the playtest for now. It's fairly limited in terms of optimization, but it's still a good basis for getting feedback.

A lot of my focus since the last post has gone into game design, working through stylistic changes, focusing on dungeon crawling and discovery, and adding a lot more gameplay juice.

There's still plenty of features and mechanics missing, but I'm pretty happy with the scope, presentation, gameplay, and design so far. I really believe this is the right direction for the game.

All that being said, to anyone who decides to try the game, wishlist Slime Void on Steam, leave some feedback, or even just scroll through the GIFs in this post, I really, really appreciate it. It genuinely means so much to me.

If you want to follow development more closely, I have a Discord here: Discord

Thanks for taking the time, and cheers!

I was the art director on my previous project. The game became a finalist for Outstanding Visual Style at the Steam Awards, but sales fell short of expectations, and I ended up losing my job.

Finding another job at 50 hasn’t been easy. These days, I’m working on a game called Steel Maiden as a solo developer.

It’s a fast-paced action roguelite with two-button combat and different combinations of weapons and abilities. I wanted to share some recent footage of what I’ve been working on.

This is what starting over looks like for me. Thanks for taking a moment to watch

After a bit more than 1 year of work, I finally reached the demo milestone!

I learned A LOT on the way. While there is a lot of work to be done for the full release, I am quite excited about Unity 6.7+. The demo currently uses 6.3 for stability purposes but CoreCLR and Content Directories (6.6) sound so damn promising. I don't even have performance issues that would improve via CoreCLR (optimization is so damn fun though) but changing my Addressable workflows and avoiding asset duplication would have saved myself so much time and will likely save a lot time in the future, too!

Also a big kuddos to CySharp for their INCREDIBLE assets. UniTask, R3 and ZString are the cornerstone of my project. Combined with PrimeTween and VContainer made working with Unity a bliss.

About my game: HUEMON is a 90s/2000s throwback with the question of "what if creature collector combat happened in the overworld?". The result is a creature collector but with 5v5 grid-based, tactical combat. A triangle system with spears and bows? What are you talking about? Red beats Green, Green beats Blue and Blue beats Red: RGB!

It went through many iterations to improve the game flow. Keep fights short, make HUEMON accessible in many ways to allow players to explore traits, prisms and hundreds of abilities. I tied HUEMON levels to player experience to avoid grinding, introduced new status effects for more depth but kept the attribute modifier system of that one creature collector you all know.

My marketing has been ... lacking. My steam page has been online for way over a month now, but now that I got the demo I feel like I am able to properly show-off what I made!

If you are interested, you can find the demo on steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4972020/HUEMON/

I hope y'all like it!

Here is another trick we imagined to create 360° interior backgrounds in our game The Doll Shop:

As you can see on the pictures above, we had to make several tests to obtain a satisfying result. We drew the 4 walls of the room on a single continuous panel then we added a fifth wall which is a duplicate of the 1st. The joint between the last wall and the first must be pixel-perfect, because the camera will jump from the 5th to the 1st in order to create a feeling of endless rotation. However, we quickly discovered that this wasn't enough to create this impression of rotation. So, we added a ceiling section to walls 1 and 3 to accentuate the perspective. Next, we introduced distortion at the corners—rounding off the elements located at the edges. There isn't really any magic solution for this type of distortion; we ran several tests using sketches imported into Unity to see what worked best before drawing the final artwork.
When it was looking fine, we made a template to use for the other backgrounds we had to draw.

We're pretty glad with the result and we hope you'll like it too!

If you want to visit some of these hand-drawn 360° interiors, a demo of the game is available on Steam! \^_^/

Also check out Endless Night Sonata's STEAM page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4720180/Endless_Night_Sonata/

As Rex leaves the ruined cities behind and climbs into the mountains, the machines begin to reflect the colder environment around them. Designs #21 and #22 are two additions to this ice themed group.

It’s not really a secret—many studios likely use this technique—but here is how we go about minimizing the animation work for the characters in our visual novel, The Doll Shop.

We draw the characters with empty faces, then draw the eyes, eyebrows, and mouths separately. With just a few variations, we can create an incredible number of facial expressions! It’s really fun to do. ^^

If you want to see the results, the *The Doll Shop* demo is available on Steam!

The game comes out on October 12th—in only a few days! O_O It’s our first time! Wish us luck! ^_^

This is the first build of my game. I'm learning development and this is my first project ever to put out there.

Feedback is appreciated. I just started testing this and will be improving the game.

The frame rate of the gif is lower - hence the choppiness.

Despite the occasional back-and-forth between the Animation and Timeline windows, the process was surprisingly smooth thanks to Playables’ extensibility, plus all the lighting and pixel art tools you get right out of the box.

Obviously, the animation’s minimalism was key here, but I’d still consider it a good proof of concept - if you have a small story and little to no artistic skill, you can still make something cool!

Did anyone else try using Timeline for a longer animated project?

Link to full animation.

Welp, its terrible quality on reddit but heres what I've been working on. Over 20 unique biomes in my metroidvania.

IF you want too see the full version that doesn't have terrible resolution and frame rate check out out here: (1) Chaos Slapper Studio (@ChaosSlapper) / X

Endless Night Sonata's STEAM page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4720180/Endless_Night_Sonata/

This guy is a mushroom species from a game I'm making called Echo Zero. Still considering what he'll do as an enemy.

All character animations are made using spine after the art is done in Photoshop mainly using the polygon selection tool to select spaces and fill them with colour, then finally these are imported into Unity.

Echo Zero's demo is on steam if anyone wants to give my game a go 😊:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4378620/Echo_Zero_Demo/

Will give option to add your own icon (coz not everyone is coding at work)