I decided to revisit how the cards are being managed and rendered. There were a couple of steps involved.

The first part was re-writing the card shader; the new shader is a simple Normal Map sprite shader, taking in a texture and a normal map.

For each pixel on the image, the Normal Map contains the angle of the surface at that pixel; it's encoded as X (Red), Y (Green) and Z (Blue) in the texture map. The blue-ish cards are the Normal Maps (blue because most of the surfaces point straight towards the camera. 

The second step was to rebuild card movement; to show off the nice Normal Maps, I wanted a big of rotation on the cards when they move; the simplest way to do that in Unity was driving it all through the physics system.

Finally, having made this new system I got inspired to create a collectible card system:


There's right now 15 cards, each one unlocks through story or side-quests. Katie's card, for example, unlocks from giving her the True Flawless Fire Gem. Having collected a card back you can use it in Elsewhere, and when you play poker.

Apart from that, I'm close to finishing Act V+ (the next public release). Hopefully I'll get a version out for testing today, clean up any new bugs, and release it tomorrow or the day after. Enjoy!