What is the overall cost difference between making a 2D top-down vs 3D isometric vs 3D third-person?

Hi, I know this isn't a great question as there are a lot of factors that could influence the answer, but I'm hoping someone might be able to give me a very rough estimate.

I have a game concept that would work in multiple formats and wondered how difficult/costly it would be to do each of them. For the sake of argument let's assume that I'm employing a developer and an artist and not working on it myself. Let's also assume that, in terms of the assets, I don't want them to be super cheap and low quality, but they don't have to be top of the line either. Finally, let's assume that the game I want to build is Stardew Valley (it's not at all, I just figured a lot of people would be at least a little familiar with it).

So I assumed the cheapest option would be go with a 2D 3/4 perspective setup with pixel art or similar, just like the Stardew Valley in reality. But say I was to build roughly the same game using 3D assets and an isometric perspective. Would the difference between those two projects be slight, absolutely enormous, or somewhere in between? How about if it was a 3D third person?

Apologies again for the bad question, I'm really just looking for the ballpark difference in the complexity and time difference in coding, and building the assets for, these three approaches to the same game concept.

Cheers

 

in my experience it is much easier to find good quality 3d assets for free or cheap.

And from 3d assets it is not hard to turn them into 2d assets - sprites, billboards, etc.

Not so much experience with 2d but i was just asking same question myself and this is what I've found. I am not sure the workload of doing 2d is really much smaller. Depends on your art needs of course.

 

Interesting. Are you talking about pre-built asset packs or actually paying someone to design something bespoke? Because I guess a larger market for pre-build 3D assets might skew the price. Just a thought. Thanks for the reply.

 

Well my perspective is skewed a little because I am more of a 3d artist than programmer so I already have libraries of models and from that it is much faster to modify existing things than make something new. I've never paid anybody to make art because that's my specialty - I pay for code to be written.

But my workflow for art almost never involves making something from scratch anymore. Usually with 10 minutes of searching I can find a free or cheap good quality model to fit just about any needs. From that it is dramatically faster to modify to suit specific needs than make anything from scratch.

I explored 2d workflows a little because I was looking for ways to lighten the load of my projects. But what I found is that - for me, a non-skilled 2d artist - it was faster and easier to just create sprites of trees (for example) from 3d models (get a package or two of maxtree and you can accomplish a lot.)

Same thing for characters, props, etc. Get ahold of some cheap or free 3d characters. You can easily find ripped models from existing games - this gives you most of the advantage of having a dedicated artist in that your proportions and forms are already there. All you got to do is alter it to make it unique. Just like working from a recipe.

From there you can pose multiple ways non-destructively, then render them into sprites.


That's just my general workflow but it is beginning from an understanding and practice of 3d art. I think no matter what in gamedev you hit a point where if you want to make something decent and marketable you have to spend a little money. For me that's with the code. Only so much one person can do.

 

BIGTIMEMASTER is a talented 3D artist, so he can get good visual results quickly. I'm in the opposite boat. As a programmer, I contract out art. I've found that 2D art is significantly less expensive -- for mostly-static images like environments and character portraits.

3D animation is generally inexpensive. With Unity, you can apply almost any humanoid animation -- a walk cycle, mocap of digging a garden, etc. -- to any humanoid 3D model. The Asset Store has a large selection of excellent, inexpensive 3D animation packs.

2D animation is different. There are generally two kinds: cel-based (spritesheets, common in pixel art games) and skeleton-based (body parts are separate and rotate around pivot points, common in Flash games).

For cel animation, the artist draws individual frames of animation as separate images, separately for each character. Walk cycle for 40 characters? Maybe 8 images x 40 characters = 240 images. Waving hello? Another 240 images. Digging in a garden? Another 240 images. There are some things the artist can do to reduce the images, but it always ends up being a lot. Each image is much less expensive than a 3D model, but it still adds up.

For skeleton-based 2D animation, the artist draws individual body parts, which can then be layered and connected at rotation points. Unity has tools to connect these body parts and animate them. But there generally aren't off-the-shelf 2D animation libraries, so you'll have to set up the animation yourself or hire someone to do it. Although the tools can deform body parts somewhat to make them appear to be connected more smoothly, there's always a bit of rigidity that I personally find a little off-putting (like old Flash games), unlike cel animation where each image can be as fluid as the artist wants.

To sum it up, in my experience:

• The expense in 3D is in making and rigging custom models. If you can find 3D models on the Asset Store that you like, it's much less expensive. But you run the risk of looking like other games unless you can give them a unique appearance with lighting, shaders, post-processing, etc.
• The expense in 2D is either all the images (cel-based) or a mix of images and animation (skeleton-based).
• If you're deciding solely on cost, then if your game needs a huge variety of animations, 3D might be the way to go. Otherwise 2D will probably be less expensive.
• As BIGTIMEMASTER wrote, another option for 2D spritesheets is to capture step-by-step animations of 3D models. But in that case you might as well just go 3D.

Coding is another matter. The cost of 2D vs 3D may depend dramatically on the type of game you're making.

 

Also just my 2 cents in trying to do both - code necessary to make a really good sophisticated 3D game is much costlier than 2D alternative, I think. With 3D - your arch nemesis isn't going to be character models, texture mapping, level design, but something entirely invisible - the camera. Coding a really good camera and getting past the million edge cases and narrowing down the scope of your game to accommodate such edge cases will take most of your time during testing. With 2D you don't have this issue and a majority of the visual design is done through art.

 

BIGTIMEMASTER thanks for the insight, all of my game dev experience thus far has been in 2D so it's useful to know a little about the process of acquiring 3D assets. I didn't realise you could so easilly find what you were looking for and then just spend some time fitting it to what you wanted it to look like.

TonyLi I'm also in the same boat as you, though I'm quite inexperienced with programming games (background is more web dev). Thanks for cutting straight to what is expensive/time-consuming about each approach, that's really useful. With regards to the coding, do you have any insight into the difference in complexity between a 2D 3/4 perspective ARPG (similar to Stardew Valley or a Zelda-like) and a fixed-camera isometric ARPG using 3D models (like Diablo 3, though obviously not quite so AAA!)?

GazingUp yeah that's a really good point. Presumably that only applies to third-person though, guessing a fixed-camera isometric game wouldn't have any camera issues?

 

I suppose a fixed camera would solve the camera coding bit. Again - goes with what I mentioned about narrowing down the scope of your game to accommodate with what you can work with in the time and resources you got.

3D and 2D are very different skill-sets although it may feel similar working with them initially. Gameplay wise, graphics wise, feel (smoother animations and less organic looking unless done high quality requires a lot of coding and modeling/texturing/animation), 3D is vastly more complex just because of the Z-axis. 2D leaves a lot of room to the imagination. It's really a stylistic choice.

One other drawback with 2D and an advantage with 3D (For top-down) is with every character (depending) you have to draw 3 directions (4 or 8 if you want the left/right/diagonals to be dynamic) for all the animations which will definitely take a lot of time.

 

They're about the same complexity. Let your art and game design decisions dictate the camera. If you're doing 2D pixel art, you may need to consider pixel perfect adjustment. In both cases, you may need to do something when an obstacle such as a wall blocks the camera's view of the player. It's a more common issue with 3D isometric (primarily due to art style), but on the other hand in 3D you can move the camera around for cinematic sequences if you want.

 

Define “cheap”.

Processor and GPU costs? 2D.

Financial or time costs? Depends.

3d can have a much faster workflow if you are doing lots of things with a single object.

With 3D there’s a big up front cost of the initial rigging, but then doing the animations is fairly cheap.

2D is fairly easy to get going, but the cost of every frame remains the same.

These days it’s usually easier to do 3D if you are doing something more complex.

 

2D can be extremely cheap if you're willing to wait for the Humble Game Developer Bundles to come around. Below is the latest one available intended for RPGs.

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/royalty-free-rpg-game-dev-assets-software

 

you can find 2D at a very good price

 

This is a good example of how to make games on a budget. I don't mean humble bundle specifically, but just keeping eye out for deals like this. They are everywhere. Unless you are very particular about your art, it really is possible to make good looking games while spending almost no money on art. Just so much stuff free/cheap out there, both 2d and 3d. Just got to spend some time snooping around.

same goes for sound effects too.

 

Speaking of which...

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/n4vhcs/150gb_of_high_quality_sound_effects_for_game/