Lets say i want to develop a mortal kombat like game. Should i do it in 2d or in 3d using a side camera view?
What do you prefer and why?
3D. It’s going to have a lot of animations. (See my reason here .) Also, you can adjust hand and foot positions precisely using IK.
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Tony’s points are good (do follow his link). I’ve done a couple of MK-like games, and I’ve done them both ways (2D and 3D). Both are a lot of work. We actually did the 2D game by building and animating 3D models, and rendering those out to sprites, in order to get that “real video” style MK is famous for — but also because hand-drawing that many animation frames would be prohibitively expensive.
But which one is more work depends entirely on the skills, tools, and preferences of your art team (and you’re certainly going to need an art team for a project like this).
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I haven’t done this but wondered about it so I’ll mention it, maybe somebody can say something about it.
If you wanted to do 2d for some reason or another - like performance reasons or jsut aesthetic - but want to leverage the power of 3d for faster animation iteration, would using 3d rigged characters and just rendering them to sprites make sense? You can even render them so its indistinguishable from 2d.
I realize that’s a weird way to work but if you were accustomed to 3d already or had easier access to 3d art, would that make sense?
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Sure! Blizzard did it for games like Diablo and Starcraft.
I wouldn’t recommend it for a modern fighting game, though. You’d need a lot of images for all of the animations for different moves, and you couldn’t take advantage of IK to position 3D body parts better when grappling. (Unless you’re doing 2D skeletal-based animation like Guacamelee.)
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If I remember correctly, Dead Cells had a hybrid 2D/3D workflow where they used 3D models to block out the animations and then draw over them in their pixel art style.
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3d might be better suited for that game.
But if you are planning to do it like midway, and take photos of yourself, wearing Mortal Kombat styled costumes, and doing Mortal Kombat styled moves, and then turning them into digitised 2d sprites, like how they did for MK1, 2 and 3, then go 2d.