Clouds and Shadows

To give the appearance of flying, as opposed to being on the ground, clouds and shadows were added in this update.

Since I haven't made a shootem up game like this before, I wasn't sure exactly how to do it. 

Clouds

The clouds each get a random opacity, scale, and speed. There are also a few different sprites, but these might get updated later.

Should these be clouds or fog? Maybe it would look better if going for some kind of fog shaped sprites rather than clouds.

Shadows

I thought the shadows were going to be simple, but the first few attempts looked really bad. They just look like black sprites attached to the ships. When I offset them completely, like so they was a gap between the shadow and ship, they didn't really look related.

What I have now, I have them offset from the ship depending on where they are at on the screen. So if it is right in the middle of the screen the shadow will be right under them. If to the left, the shadow to the left, and farther to the left the more offset to the left, and so forth. Basically like the light source is in the middle of the screen and above. It might not make perfect sense as a light source in reality, but I feel like it makes sense for a simple video game just to give some depth.

Right now the background is one layer so it doesn't move differently over those objects. This is supposed to be kind of a quick collab game so I'm not sure how much time will be given to making dynamic lighting, ha.

Also, I know the sleigh shadow is a bit off, but I'll fix that later as there will be some more sleigh updates.

Credit

Big thanks to Feyter on Mastadon for his comment and suggestion on this. It was the sole source of inspiration on this!

Feedback

Please give any feedback in this thread on clouds, lighting, shadows, depth, background, or any other decorative type of effects.