How do you build the environment? Specifically the ground you walk on? In unity would I just import planes and put the repeating sprite texture on them?
Like this game:
How would I recreate what it shows in the first minute? When a player encounters a rock or a higher level (like a cliff edge) Do I just make more planes and then throw the other sprite texture on it? What about colliders…do I just make box colliders where the rocks/mountains/buildings are?
I know how to use sprite sheets and I also know how to make 2d games (thats what I do as a full time programmer) but I’m not sure where to start in making this retro style. I don’t understand also about objects in game. What about a house? Is that too just a plane that has sprites on it that make it look like its in perspective?
Thinking again and looking back at my favorite old-school sprite based games, there were surely no 3d planes…how in the heck do I tackle this?
Thanks,
Mark
the stuff you see there is quite a bit of manual work cause to have that as efficient as in zenonia means that you wrote an own bunch of things like a rendering system using single meshes with support for efficient streaming tile map systems and alike
it also includes writting an own collision system cause using physx for such a thing is an overkill, a massive one
but aside of that parts its just normal isometric 2d, on which you will find hundreds if not thousands of articles on the web and in game dev books
Traditionally these are tile based - the landscape, including trees, buildings, cliff faces, fences - everything - is built from tiles, which (as you say) are planes with textures on them.
Even if it looks 3D, it is just in 2D with one or more layers of tiles above one and other.
Some of the elements (e.g. ground) are 1x1 tile, some (like trees) may be 1x2 or 1x3 etc, but always a multiple of the tile size. Most tiling engines support different layers - e,g, ground, objects, players, top.
I guess there is no real ‘one’ way to do collisions. Box colliders would work. Older games would just use tile-based collision. You can’t walk on this square because it contains a tree.
There are two ways to do it that I can think of:
- Like dreamora says, use an isometric or 2D approach of which there are tons or info on the web
- Build it in 3D and place the camera so that it looks like the same viewpoint.
[edit] See this post for how to optimise sprites so that each time doesn’t generate its own draw call.
Thanks for the info. I do use sprite manager (for my two iPhone games Lamanite Drop Revenge. So from what you are saying it sounds like my idea of how to do this in unity is on the right path. Definitely will take advantage of the batch rendering. I just wanted to make sure I was doing this in the most efficient manner.
Thanks