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Color & Light

Light and shadow reference board

Reference photos sorted by light direction.

Workshops taught us more than any tutorial. Watching people fold paper cubes and then rebuild them in CSS showed exactly where the mental model breaks: the order of rotations, the origin of each face, and the moment a block turns inside out. Most of our tutorials now start with the paper version for that reason.

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Responsive isometric scenes need a plan for narrow screens. Sometimes the answer is to scale everything down with clamp(), and sometimes it is to hide secondary blocks entirely. What rarely works is letting the scene overflow sideways, which makes the page scroll horizontally and feels broken on a phone.

Testing on real devices

Stacking order is the part that trips people up. In a flat layout, later elements paint on top. In a tilted scene, a block that is further back must paint first, even if it appears later in the markup. Either sort your markup by depth or give each block a z-index derived from its row and column.

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Written by

Sam Whitfield

Sam makes tile-based games in the evenings and brings the sorting tricks back to the blog. Currently building a very small harbour.

All 17 posts by Sam Whitfield

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