Hey NickZucc -
So there are a few settings that must be adjusted but you can achieve the look you are after in Paper2D (minus the Skeletal-driven Sprite, which is actually [on our roadmap][1] to add into the engine). I’ll try to breakdown everything:
Translucency Sorting -
This is a result of the deferred rendering in the engine and how we currently deal with Translucency, you can however manual set the depth sort order for translucent objects by going into the details panel of the sprite and manually setting the Translucency Sort Priority, the higher the number always draws on top with a default value of 0.
Lit and Lighting Sprites:
The default Paper2D project in the engine is setup to not use lighting so all sprites are created using the MaskedUnlitSprite Material, however we do have a MaskedLitSprite Material (and TranslucentLitSprite) and you would need to set those Materials in the Sprite’s Details:
In addition to that though, the default project has no lighting in it since all the default sprites are set to unlit and emissive. So you would need to add a light, a spotlight or directional light would probably work the best for overall lighting. I would suggest using the settings below to start (the big one being turn off Inverse Sqaure, it might be the way light works in the real world but in 2D it can be hard to layout lighting using):
Finally you will need to make sure your sprites actually cast shadows and in the case of translucent shadows like these vines they cast them volumentrically:
Hopefully this can get you started and if there is anything I can do to help further please let me know -
Eric Ketchum