About isometric games...

Hello there
I want to make an isometric game but I have been having a hard time trying to find tutorials about it and I don't have any experience with this type of game, actually I found some tutorials on youtube but most of them uses an Unity asset and I don't feel like using it because I want to understand the logic behind it . What I want is to create an isometric game that uses 2D sprites as the ground tiles but I want to use a 3D model as the characters(similar to Project Zomboid for those who know the game).
My doubts are:
1- What will I have to do differently than if I was doing a 2D platformer?
2- When I import my model in the project how should i rotate the model so it alligns with the isometric sprite?
3- How do i script the movement?

Please if i typed something stupid please let me know, i really have no idea about the appropriate way to work with isometric.
By the way i will be using a 45° angle for the sprites.

 

Well... for starters... do you truly mean isometric 2d game... or a 3d game with a viewport that looks isometric?

You bring up Project Zomboid... which I haven't played... but from the videos this looks like a 3d game with a viewport that looks isometric. But everything appears to be 3d tiles.

If you actually have 2d sprites that you're putting 3d models over, well the rotation depends on the angle of projection. Isometric usually means that the sprite artwork has a 120deg angle on all 3 axes, to make it appear 3d. It's 120 degrees because that's 360 degrees split evenly in 3... isometric meaning "equal measures" (iso - equal, metric - measure).

see:


But of course there's other projections that people CALL isometric, but actually isn't isometric. So it depends on the angle of projection you create.

As for scripting the movement... well that's just worked out from the angles you decide upon. Walk down those angles and you're good. If you mean in depth scripting of movement... well that's a broad subject, lets start with the other stuff first.

 

Are you talking about stuff like Pillars of Eternity and so on in terms of the art style? That was done in Unity so it's definitely possible, the camera itself would be very easy to do 3D wise if you just wanted to make an isometric game, you just rotate it to match the angle you want. For the camera movement itself, you have the camera parented to an empty game object ( credit to quill18 for this idea, I found him mentioning in a youtube video comments page ) and you can even have your camera rotate around just like in an RTS game depending on how much movement you want in the camera.

As for the art itself, I'm interested in working out how they do that as well as i'm still working it out too. There are two options that i'm thinking they've probably done, they've got really good artists who have drawn up the entire background, or they have multiple high resolution sprites, then they have colliders to seperate out everything. So if you've seen the Baldurs Gate games and so on they'll place big colliders and so on on the statues and buildings, anywhere you can't walk.

Another option would be that they've created a flat 2D background for the floor with lots of fancy detail and then they've added in 3D, I personally think though that the previous option is more likely, you need a lot of skill in 2D drawing to make that kind of detail and I noticed that the lighting and everything was completely static.

Characters of course are 3D and I think they were 3D even in Baldurs Gate, the TLDR of all of this is it's mainly down to your knowledge of perspective. If you don't have good art skills whatever you make with this kind of thing will unfortunately be quite bad which is why when you have those big games coming out the art even in the simple cutscenes always looks amazing and the games are quite pricey.

I'm sure someone with more knowledge though may have a simpler solution perhaps but I think if you're going to do it properly you'll need good art skills for a game like that but there are also very simple isometric games out there that aren't complicated in their art at all.

If you were to go the full 3D route it might actually be a lot easier for you if you're new as you'd just have to get the right angles with the camera and then the 3D engine would take care of everything art wise, it's all about perspective.

Edit: Lordofduct got there before me but he as exactly the right idea, yes, if you're talking purely about 2D sprites, all they've done is drawn them at a certain perspective.

 

It will probably be better to make a 3d game with a isometric viewport then, i was kind of stuck in this thought that the best way to do what i wanted was in 2d. From what i've read the developers of Project Zomboid used 2d sprites for everything in the early stages of the game, but later it was becoming very time consuming to draw all of the animations so they started using 3d models for the characters, that's why i was so confused , anyway thx a lot.

 

Yeah, it will probably better to do it in 3D then, any ideas of what's the most efficient way to place the ground sprites? like should i create a game object and just place lot's of childs with the sprite image?

 

Nice answer @lordofduct That diagram is definitely going on my wall. I'd like to ask about the source. Where did you get it from?

 

The wiki article for isometric games:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_graphics_in_video_games_and_pixel_art