Why our game had no shadows (and why turning them on was the easy part)

Here's something you probably never noticed about Mythfell, because it was invisible: until recently, nothing in the game cast a shadow. Not the towers, not the rocks, not your hero. Every object on the battlefield looked slightly... floating. Players can never name that feeling, but they feel it. The scene reads flat and weightless, and something feels "off" about the whole game without anyone knowing why.

We knew shadows were missing. What we didn't know was that fixing it was three separate bugs wearing one trench coat.

Bug 1: the sun was pointing the wrong way. Every battle in the game has its own light — morning, overcast, sunset, night. When we built those lighting moods, we placed the sun behind the camera, which is the classic mistake: shadows fall away from you, directly behind whatever cast them, where you can't see them. All eighteen lighting setups across all three regions had the sun in the wrong half of the sky. Flipping them to a three-quarter front angle means shadows fall toward you, where your eye actually reads them. That one change made the scene read deeper instantly.

Bug 2: shadows were literally switched off. In the project settings, the sun's shadow setting was "None." This one's embarrassing. It had probably been that way since an early performance experiment and nobody ever turned it back on.

Bug 3: the sneaky one. After fixing the first two, our PC screenshots showed beautiful shadows — and phones still showed nothing. Turns out shadow distance is measured from the camera, and our game uses an orthographic top-down camera. For that kind of camera, the standard trick is to park it far away, because distance doesn't change the framing. Ours sits about 80 meters back. The shadow system was set to only draw shadows within 30 meters of the camera — so every single object in the game was outside the shadow range. The fix was raising that number, plus making sure phones actually ran the quality tier that has real shadow maps instead of the medium preset that draws them at a resolution you can't see.

Three bugs, one line of player-visible result: the world sits on the ground now. Rocks feel heavy. The sunset levels throw long shadows across the road. And the night levels feel genuinely dark.

It's a good reminder of how game polish actually works: it's rarely one big art push. It's noticing that the sun was facing the wrong way — and then chasing why the fix worked on your PC but not on your phone.

Next devlog: how we grew realistic-looking trees for the forest without buying a single asset.