One feature I was very proud of was the lighting, which I hadn't seen in any other game that used sprite-stacking. As with the whole style, it was a lot of smoke and mirrors, but I thought it was convincing enough. And its performance was good, as it could be computed once.

Soon, I was starting to build complete rooms with different sets of furniture. Everything could be rotated and stacked, which already gave enough freedom to make something that felt lived-in.

To be honest, at that time I thought I had something great in the works. The story I had in mind seemed really interesting and the tech also held up, so I started working on the tools needed to make this game. First up was the level editor. It started really simple.

As the game would have a big focus on the story and character interactions, next I created a way for the player to talk to NPCs. I tried to make it as stylish as possible, with dynamic UI elements like the animated talk prompt and the camera and speech bubbles working together.

When all that was done, I created another test scene, this time a more complex police station that would sit in the center of the dome. After making the environment, I added a lot of NPCs and let them run around. I was very happy with how everything turned out.

I wanted to create a world that seemed to be alive, so I also worked on animated screens and billboards, which was harder than you might think, as I couldn't use sprite-stacking for it. I had to implement transformations where I would draw the animation by shifting its four corners.