Pickups and Blob Shadows

One of the next features I'm working on is pickups. This will be copper, silver, and gold coins in its first iteration. I created prefabs for the different coins with cylinders for the coin visual. The coin visual will rotate at a constant speed. The pickups have a trigger collider that will destroy the pickup and spawn a particle effect when the player collides with the pickup. The next step will be to track the number of pickups that the player has gotten.

When I first made the pickups the distance from the ground was much higher. While testing this out I noticed that it was difficult to determine the exact location of the pickup. Moreover, I realized that it might be difficult to determine the player's location for the same reason. I decided to take some time to replace the real-time shadows for the player and pickups with blob shadows. Blob shadows are projected directly below an object. This provides a reference for the distance between the object and the ground which makes it easier to judge depth.