Layer Masking

[sputnikus]

As I can see, the flying shadows only go outside the board during startup animation, that's the moment where you need to overlay the background. Even if you want to float pieces during gameplay, you can overlay it. The rotation/perspective change where you change the prerendered board background is not interactive, all pieces have the shadows inside the board and the player can't do anything. During the transition, you can safely get rid of the background overlay, there's nothing to cover outside the board.

Hmm, it is true that the shadows only go outside the chessboard's boundaries during spawning; otherwise, the chess pieces remain on the board during rotations. In that case, I think TLN_SetLayerClip would be sufficient to clip most of the visible shadows out of sight.

What other visual effects are you considering?

Another effect I was thinking about is using scrolling, repeating patterns over sprites to indicate the capturing of pieces, similar to this:

You are welcome! I can also see Dear ImGUI running (I absolutely love this library, I wrote an entire wavetable generator with it!), which rendering backend are you using? The built-in one? SDL2? GLFW?

I'm currently using SDL2 for testing, but I plan to target mobile platforms in the future, so that is likely to change.