Boring technical guy from Volcanic Giraffe is here. If you don’t want to yawn while reading about coding stuff - better check our Galvanica game. It is much funnier that its source code :)

A good thing in JS-based open source game engines like Phaser.js is that you may patch them if needed. Phaser.js has structure obvious enought and lot of in-code comments which very help to understand what is going on. Some things could be configurable, but they are not for performance issues. Well, we are programmers here, aren't we?

One of problems we met: if one sprite is added to another one as child, it is drawn OVER parent sprite. That’s very useful if you want to draw a gun or some clothes. But we wanted to draw a shadow, and it shall be drawn UNDER parent sprite. Why to add it as child? Well, we’d like shadow to «inherit» some properties of main object (position, alpha, rotation, etc.). If not adding as child - we’d have to apply sprite’s props to shadow manually on every update.

Here how it looks by default:

What we did: overriden _renderWebGL method of Phaser.Sprite in our BaseItem class and changed order of rendering

So, how it goes now:

Much better, isn’t it?

Did you even fix/patch your game engine code during LD? It shall look like burning spaceship furniture in its furnace while flying… oh, wait, this is what Galvanica is about!