Isometric normal map

Hello. It's not a problem for me to draw the necessary scene objects in 3D. All objects will be prepared as 2d sprites, so I can also prepare a 2d normal map for them.

I really enjoy working with 2d, it simplifies what I want to avoid, which is the long work of optimizing 3d models. I can take a dirty model and quickly create content for a game.

But here's the problem, I want it to look beautiful, with shadows and light. So far, I'm at the graphic quality level of Fallout 2 or Diablo 2. Where there is just light and shadow and rendered sprites.

I want to embed a normal map in my project. Unfortunately, there is very little information on this topic, and even I don’t have enough information to achieve the desired effect, because I didn’t manage to understand plugins well. This is where I need your help.

The main problem lies in the fact that often the normal map effect works in the plane in all examples, and I did not find a way to implement it in isometric space, when the light can be behind the object without illuminating it.

The second problem that I encountered is the light sources, in the plugin settings everything comes down to specifying just a couple of light sources, while in the game there can be a lot of them, this is the light of a fire, street lamps and much more

I found a good example of working with normals, but the construct was not used there

youtu.be/jwHon2FViTk

Discussion thread I found

construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/plugin-sdk-10/c3effects-normalmapextended-130405

I think the reason you won't find anything on this very specific topic is because it's way simplier to do this in 3D there is little reason to go 2D. An example you provided seems to be a dedicated 2.5 engine based on complex shading. Normal maps won't produce the same effect in C3, because it's fundamentaly different. I don't mean to discourage you, but you can potentially waste a lot of time and effort to achieve something that can be done easier and look better in 3D. It could even be more perfomrant