2.5D Game Experience

[dzeligman]

Does anyone have any experience making one of these?

I'm thinking in perspective terms of old games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I was curious about how people have implemented them. My Game Dev Club I've started at Nebraska is about to start working on one and I wanted to see if people had any thoughts on the architecture.

I would assume we would have some form of tile engine for this. We're going to approach it in a 2D manner with multiple layers for depth and placement.
But beyond that high level approach I haven't ironed out much detail.

I've also thought about trying to make more of a 3D based environment and still using 2D sprites as quads that are essentially billboards

[yaustar]

Are you thinking more of isometric games like Diablo? Or Final Fight?

[dzeligman]

Def more Final Fight oriented.

The character will be able to move up and down limited and then from side to side.

Castle crashers would also be a good example.

[Protector one]

I'm wondering how you are going to handle vertical movement. Is up and down movement semi-analog (like in Double Dragon), or strictly segmented (like the 3 possible Z-planes in LittleBigPlanet)?
If the former, what happens when players go up and down? Is it pure vertical movement, or relative to the level's perspective? (See figure 1.) Traditionally, characters would move vertically like in the right panel. But I think it is cooler if they would move as visualized in the left panel.


Figure 1 - Perspective-sensitive v.s. traditional


(Yes, I have 1337 mspaint skillz.)

[Gshonk]

I like how you have one picture and you still labeled it figure one

[DTR]

Heh.
The idea reminds me of my own programming exercise I did for the school.

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/637/mygam.jpg

From a coding perspective it was primitive to no end, and these days Im ashamed to have produced such horrible quality, but it really taught a thing or two.
Backgrounds are just bitmaps screenshotted from doom stringed together.
Me being the artist,animator(copy-paster), sound guy, programmer, tester and designer resulted in a huge hurry with the assets, and since the exercise was graded based on programming accomplishments, I could somewhat safely ignore minor graphical issues.


Back then I used the simplified perspective that allowed only movement along tilted Y-axis and it worked nicely enough.

Definately fun to work with 2d-ishers. (although the term always reminds me of raycasters)

[dzeligman]

Ideally the vertical movement will be relative to level's perspective as in like Castle Crashers : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxGU...eature=related

but that might be too difficult to implement for an initial prototype. If the camera can adjust the zoom and perspective by changing the orientation of the foreground and background it might not be that hard though.

[DTR]

What language and or api are you going to implement this game with?

Strongly recommend using textured polygons to represent things. The costs for scaling might otherwise be horrible.

[dzeligman]

Going to start with C#/XNA, but yeah if we stick with sprites and try to scale it could get quite annoying/costly.

Might not do the perspective approach initially.

[Protector one]

Originally Posted by DTR

Heh.
The idea reminds me of my own programming exercise I did for the school.

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/637/mygam.jpg

That looks pretty cool actually. At first I thought the shadows were projected from some weird impossible light source, but then I realised they just appeared projected because all the sprites were leaning forward in the direction they're moving. :P

After seeing that Castle Crashers video, I doubt it handles vertical movement with respect to perspective. Then again, it's hard to tell without knowing the controller input that corresponds to the movement.