One of the main activities in the game will be solving supernatural mysteries. There might be weird noises coming from an abandoned building during the night, there might be a person who disappeared years ago, but can on occasion be seen in a specific place, there might be a house which turned hostile and started torturing its inhabitants, and many more. Fans of modern urban fantasy and creepypastas should have an idea what to expect.

Solving these mysteries might take many forms. A ritual might require performing, ancient scriptures might need deciphering or arcane machinery might call for being found and operated. The skills your character and their party have, will be crucial in overcoming such obstacles. And although opposition is to be expected, and combat might be unavoidable, progressing through the game will require more than just defeating enemies.

It’s quite common for 2D isometric games to have objects obscure other objects, e.g. player character be obscured by a wall that they are standing behind. Ideally the level design would make sure that situations like that didn’t happen, but in reality due to other considerations like visual or combat design, that is not always the case.

Although some games do just ignore this problem, it can have an detrimental effect on gameplay – “Where is my character?” – Pixel hunting for a head sticking out of a bush doesn’t seem like a good time.

There are multiple ways to solve that issue. Some games just fade out the obscuring object, some create a bubble around the character that makes cuts through the obscuring object. However the clearest and cleanest solution I found was to just render the character in some different way over the wall, bush or another object that would otherwise hide it.

This is much easier to do for 3D games, but with some shader and post processing shenanigans I got this to work pretty well. Now when the player party, enemies or NPCs are obscured by level geometry or decorations, they will be shown clearly. This should make navigating the player and companions through a map, or during combat much less of a hassle.