Hello everyone. As a starting dev, I did what starting devs do and attempted a game to broad and too demanding on the amount of assets and subsystems needed to complete it
. While I will never abandon it, I decided (again) to make a short game with the main fake-3d features of my "engine", but reducing tiles to 16px base instead of 24px, and swearing to keep it simpler, with no dialogs, no procedural generation mazes etc, just a succession of cool and creative levels. The main goal is still being a topdown platformer (sans the rpg parts), which, in a quick mockup should be something remotely like this:
Even if it is simpler, it needs some conceptualization to ensure good gameplay on the y and z axis, so here is what I planned:
- Levels which are much wider than taller, approaching a classic sidescroller, no vertical scrolling needed. The y axis movement is a twist on a mostly mario-like horizontal game
- Free platformer movement on x and z axis, but a smoothed out grid based movement on the y axis so players wont have trouble judging their landing on the axis which is shortened because of the perspective
- Explicit ways to let the player know how high he/she is, and distingush when objects are touching the ground or hovering in air
- Making the maximum jump distances match multiples of the tile grid
My first ideas for point 3 are:
- (Mockup above)Tie brightness levels to altitude layers on the z axis, palette swapping the color ramps one step up or down for each layer (8px)
- Cast shadows on a straight line under objects, preferentially paletted shadows by alpha + posterization shader
- Cast shadows stretching towards the bottom of the screen, at half the height the casting object, so shadows would give a visual cue as to if an object is higher or deeper in the room, and also about the length of its height on z axis
I would be very, very thankful of any suggestions for other techniques to help distinguish depth from height at parallel perspectives, as well as references on games which do things like that. I would also like opinions on that "brightness-matches height" thing, I am really not sure if it works by looking at the mock-up, but it would be the a very explicit way to do it. Thank you all in advance.