"How did you guys arrive at mixing all those perspectives? was there some reference you were working from?"
The game draws pretty heavily from beatemups like Double Dragon and Final Fight, so we kept the same basic perspective as those (although this game had a lot more vertical movement). Double Dragon in particular was a big influence because the designers were constantly screwing with perspective, on the knowledge that the player would only see one screen's-worth of area at a time. Example:
http://www.viplt.ne.jp/ddragon/double%20dragon/stagemap/mission1_stagemap.gif"Also, how did the game handle players walking behind things like buildings.. or inside a bus, did the player just disappear from view for a while?"
We had 3-4 layers available on all maps, so generally we'd set 1 in front of the player. This would include pieces of things like the bus, building tops, etc. It really has to be seen to be appreciated, and the coordination of all these levels was done by Nick (hopefully he won't mind me posting an example). He worked with incredibly limited tile counts, so basically he would use 1 layer to lay flat Lego-like blocks, a second layer for incidental details and a third for anything in front of the player. Here's a set of examples:
http://www.adamtierney.com/Nick_layers.zip"and last one, how was the level design created, was it really just one big image chopped up? or did you rough out levels with very basic blocks and then spiff them up? I'd love to know how these levels were designed and assembled."
The initial levels were sketched out by myself and David (the lead programmer). Vedsten and Nick would work off these designs and handle all art and layout themselves. As Nick got more comfortable, I'd start just giving him lists and written ideas and he came up with everything himself.
- Adam
