Something I am very proud of from my latest Ludum Dare submission is learning and implementing the Unity Shader Graph tool in URP. I hadn't previously used it and now know its quite good at doing a ton of different effects.

Fairly early on I realised I would struggle to show your units health, and stats in the game, and due to the hectic nature once you have a lot of troops it would be almost impossible to micromanage these things.

I was able to implement this fairly simple overlay texture on my sprites which blends based on a float value to add a blood effect to units as their health lowers. I was able to reference this float and use the following code to change the transparency of the texture.

_spriteMat = characterSprite.material; _spriteMat.SetFloat("_Health", 1 - (health / maxHealth));

I was able to also use the same idea and implement a flat colour + some lerping of the sprites size to add health, take damage, level up, and join team effects.

If you have any suggestions on what else I could do with this please let me know. Otherwise if you are interested in playing the game check it out here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/deliver-the-torch