2d isometric sanity check

Unity Engine
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Hello beautiful strangers!

I’ve always wanted to play more elaborate Transistor, so I’ve been trying to make that happen. And, I mean, it functions and is not complete spaghetti (or so I think), which to me is a minor miracle lol. The hardest thing so far is trying to emulate the “freeze” phase where you plan out your abilities then execute them in order (if anyone has any suggestions on how to do that I’m all ears). But that doesn’t seem like a unsolvable issue, just something I need to think about more.

No the biggest hurdle I think is that my skillset is only in 2D, which means that all characters/enemies would have to be drawn and animated in 4 different angles(up, down, 45 degree and 135 degree) , and if I wanted to do a equipment/inventory system it would be very very annoying to have gear be invisible on your character (except maybe your weapons). I’m wondering if this is too much work for just one person, or if they’re some ways of mitigating some of this that I’m missing. Some things I’ve thought about

-having gear just not appear on you except for your weapon(which would be a bummer, but not the end of the world, I mean Supergiant never do visible gear but mannn I WANNA SEE MY FAT LOOT, EPIC PURPS MAN).
-make the game a side-scroller instead of isometric, makes a lot of things easier but you lose the open world.
-learn 3D modeling, which I could but over-extending myself feels like a unwise choice.

any ideas? I lot of what I found was mostly like “just do 3D breh ezpz” which gives me heartburn but it makes sense, Wakfu is the only game I could find that does 2D isometric characters pretty well but they kind of cheese it by only animating fighting animations in 4 angles. Still though it’s been a pretty good point of reference.

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It is actually worse. If you want every 45 degree, you shouldn’t just mirror one way, so you need 0, 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, 270, and 315 for every character sprite, and every enemy sprite. Mirroring with weapons and the like will look off when you switch to the mirrors as the weapon will suddenly switch sides. Even with mirror, you’re only cutting out 3 sets of sprites. It is not likely you’re going to be able to pull this off yourself with customization of said sprites.

Take original Diablo or Diablo II. That’s a team project and even they have minimal customization of the sprites. Now, if you’re going super simple you might be able to manage it, as it you can engage in a lot of trickery to cut your sprite creation load, but I suspect you want some detail in there so that’s probably not an option, at least with customization of the sprite. Customization is really something to limit as much as possible in a 2D isometric as it is one hell of a multiplier.

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Can it be done? Yes
Will it take long? Yes
Can you do it? Only you know yourself, one man alone can build a house brick by brick but it will take years.

1 Like
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I don’t know why I completely forget about left and right when I’m thinking about isometric. But yeah it would be mirrored and it would only cut out 3 sprite sets which isn’t a lot, ain’t exactly practical for sure. Another thought would be to have the environment be isometric but the characters move as if they’re in 2D, something like this

which doesn’t look too bad if a little strange.