Beginner with some questions for Tile Based Game

Unity Engine
1

Hey I’m very new to unity and 3D in general. I’ve only ever made 2D games so wrapping my head around the third dimension is a little strange for me at the moment, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

What I want to do is make a simple point and click tile based environment (pretty much something like the old school runescape), you click on a tile and the hero walks to it. Now I have done tile based games before in 2D (with a fixed map though), but I have some questions because I feel this might be different.

What I was thinking of doing is create a grid of plains and have each of them as a tile, and then use ray casting to see which one the mouse is hovering over. Then as the character moves about, the plains scroll and when they move off screen they jump to the other side of the screen (outside of the cameras view of course) to make a seamless ground. There would be a map, which would hold the properties (color, walkable flag, objects it might have attached to it), which would update the plains properties, relative to the players position.

Problems are that it’s just a completely flat environment then, which is really boring. Also I would need to make some kind of fog of war or else it would look really dumb when putting the camera angle down all the way, you would be able to see the edge of the map.

Do you guys have suggestions of how to set up the tile based environment, or tutorials that touch what I’m going for?

Thanks

2

I’ll just offer a couple of comments:

First, I wouldn’t bother scrolling and ‘recycling’ the tiles, as you described. It would be more typical (and would make more sense, IMO) simply to move the character through a fixed (for static objects, at least) environment, as is done in most games.

Regarding the camera angle and how much of the environment you can see, you might be able to address that problem by using fog effects.

Regarding the environment being flat, that’s probably more of a general game design issue. That is, if you want the environment to ‘not be flat’, you’ll need to factor that in when deciding how to approach the game from a technical standpoint. (For example, you might choose to use the built-in terrain system to create the environment rather than a grid of flat tiles.)