Old school Isometric RPG hardship

[CanadianCorndog]

Making an isometric game by yourself is ambitious. I would just use Unity with Tiled or the built-in isometric support or Love2D with libraries personally. You could also mix in some 3D stuff to ease the burden.
You probably don't have shaders so you have fewer options for stuff like shadows and layering and blending tiles.
Most isometric engines have multiple layers. Infinity Engine had seven. This lets you fiddle with what is in front and behind. Things like circles around players feet require at least three layers (front half of circle, player, back half or circle).

I will NEVER EVER use Unity for development. They are filthy scammers (I do use it for the convenience of minor maintenance tasks however). Woke Godot, etc and can also flush him/herself down the toilet.

I have trialed many engines and no engine that I tried, has come close in terms of isometric functionality for my needs. That's why I am doing what I am doing. Actually, in fact there isn't really a great amount of work remaining to do with the isometric engine aspect of things. I'm pretty happy with that as I mentioned in a previous post. I have moved onto planning, content creation, system design, and so on.

Good for you. This guy says similar, and offers other reasons why programmers should roll their own engines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOtxjOLst2k

If you want to do everything from scratch and spend 10+ years doing it (often at the amateur level) then go for it. Keep in mind that Jonathan Blow does not make everything by himself. Here's the credits for one of his games. https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/witness_/credits

I'm more interested in leveraging all of the free tools available for personal projects. I focus more on doing new things, instead of proving I can do old things, in my personal projects so my perspective is different.

 

[Davaris]

Making an isometric game by yourself is ambitious. I would just use Unity with Tiled or the built-in isometric support or Love2D with libraries personally. You could also mix in some 3D stuff to ease the burden.
You probably don't have shaders so you have fewer options for stuff like shadows and layering and blending tiles.
Most isometric engines have multiple layers. Infinity Engine had seven. This lets you fiddle with what is in front and behind. Things like circles around players feet require at least three layers (front half of circle, player, back half or circle).

I will NEVER EVER use Unity for development. They are filthy scammers (I do use it for the convenience of minor maintenance tasks however). Woke Godot, etc and can also flush him/herself down the toilet.

I have trialed many engines and no engine that I tried, has come close in terms of isometric functionality for my needs. That's why I am doing what I am doing. Actually, in fact there isn't really a great amount of work remaining to do with the isometric engine aspect of things. I'm pretty happy with that as I mentioned in a previous post. I have moved onto planning, content creation, system design, and so on.

Good for you. This guy says similar, and offers other reasons why programmers should roll their own engines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOtxjOLst2k

If you want to do everything from scratch and spend 10+ years doing it (often at the amateur level) then go for it. Keep in mind that Jonathan Blow does not make everything by himself. Here's the credits for one of his games. https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/witness_/credits

I'm more interested in leveraging all of the free tools available for personal projects. I focus more on doing new things, instead of proving I can do old things, in my personal projects so my perspective is different.

Breaking new ground in design is the main reason he makes games. He is saying its very hard to do things using a generalist engine, so much so, that its not worth it. He hires top people, tells them what he needs done, and keeps an eye on their work. If what they make doesn't work for his particular game, he tells them to change it so it does. So he's like a chef running his own restaurant, and the help he gets is not remotely comparable to using a generalist game engine.

At the end of the video he compared software to an apple that is rotting. I didn't understand what he meant by that, until I saw these posts. I also have old code I wrote that uses libraries and it does not compile.

https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1426299131270615040
https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1402555611900911619

So your personal projects probably won't compile outside of a virtual machine in 5 years, and no one but you is going to care anyway. They won't lead to a paying job outside of webdev, because you didn't do anything difficult in your spare time, that would improve your skills.

Libraries are okay, but if you use them know there is a price to pay. I will use an open source library for what I am not interested in, but I will not use an engine again, because they feel like a straight jacket. Also, you do not need an engine if you are making a 2D game, and 2D games are not old bro.

Unity fired a lot of its engineering staff recently, because they are in financial trouble. Apparently they don't make money selling engines or assets. In game advertising is the bulk of their revenue, and they've just partnered with a company that makes spyware/trojans, or something like that. I've also seen people say their new CEO is the same guy that ran EA's share price into the ground, but I don't know the history of that.

 

[CanadianCorndog]

All of these points come out of a kind of a big philosophical/ethical/technical/political jumble. So far:
- Unity are scammers
- Godot engine guy is woke
- no isometric engine meets his needs
- everyone should make their own engines
- be a chef and hire top people
- software is rotting
- stuff won't compile in 5 years
- I will never have a paying job outside of webdev
- I don't do anything difficult in my spare time
- libraries are ok if open source
- engines are like a straight jacket
- you do not need an engine
- Unity fired it's engineering staff
- John Riccitielo drove the EA share price into the ground

I don't worry about any of those things. I've used lots of commercial and open source engines, most of them have been great and let me do innovative stuff instead of grunt work.

If you can't find an isometric engine that works for you, it would make sense to make your own.

 

[gaussgunner]

https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1426299131270615040
https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1402555611900911619

So your personal projects probably won't compile outside of a virtual machine in 5 years, and no one but you is going to care anyway. They won't lead to a paying job outside of webdev, because you didn't do anything difficult in your spare time, that would improve your skills.

That's true of libraries, engines, frameworks, websites, and of course phone shit. Get used to it. It's usually not too bad if you use simple, stable, relatively popular libraries and maintain your project after it's "finished".

You also don't need libraries for every little thing, it's often reasonable to write an algorithm from scratch or copypaste a small part of an open source program or library into your code with a few minor modifications.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Making an isometric game by yourself is ambitious. I would just use Unity with Tiled or the built-in isometric support or Love2D with libraries personally. You could also mix in some 3D stuff to ease the burden.
You probably don't have shaders so you have fewer options for stuff like shadows and layering and blending tiles.
Most isometric engines have multiple layers. Infinity Engine had seven. This lets you fiddle with what is in front and behind. Things like circles around players feet require at least three layers (front half of circle, player, back half or circle).

I will NEVER EVER use Unity for development. They are filthy scammers (I do use it for the convenience of minor maintenance tasks however). Woke Godot, etc and can also flush him/herself down the toilet.

I have trialed many engines and no engine that I tried, has come close in terms of isometric functionality for my needs. That's why I am doing what I am doing. Actually, in fact there isn't really a great amount of work remaining to do with the isometric engine aspect of things. I'm pretty happy with that as I mentioned in a previous post. I have moved onto planning, content creation, system design, and so on.

Good for you. This guy says similar, and offers other reasons why programmers should roll their own engines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOtxjOLst2k

If you want to do everything from scratch and spend 10+ years doing it (often at the amateur level) then go for it. Keep in mind that Jonathan Blow does not make everything by himself. Here's the credits for one of his games. https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/witness_/credits

I'm more interested in leveraging all of the free tools available for personal projects. I focus more on doing new things, instead of proving I can do old things, in my personal projects so my perspective is different.

Breaking new ground in design is the main reason he makes games. He is saying its very hard to do things using a generalist engine, so much so, that its not worth it. He hires top people, tells them what he needs done, and keeps an eye on their work. If what they make doesn't work for his particular game, he tells them to change it so it does. So he's like a chef running his own restaurant, and the help he gets is not remotely comparable to using a generalist game engine.

At the end of the video he compared software to an apple that is rotting. I didn't understand what he meant by that, until I saw these posts. I also have old code I wrote that uses libraries and it does not compile.

https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1426299131270615040
https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1402555611900911619

So your personal projects probably won't compile outside of a virtual machine in 5 years, and no one but you is going to care anyway. They won't lead to a paying job outside of webdev, because you didn't do anything difficult in your spare time, that would improve your skills.

Libraries are okay, but if you use them know there is a price to pay. I will use an open source library for what I am not interested in, but I will not use an engine again, because they feel like a straight jacket. Also, you do not need an engine if you are making a 2D game, and 2D games are not old bro.

Unity fired a lot of its engineering staff recently, because they are in financial trouble. Apparently they don't make money selling engines or assets. In game advertising is the bulk of their revenue, and they've just partnered with a company that makes spyware/trojans, or something like that. I've also seen people say their new CEO is the same guy that ran EA's share price into the ground, but I don't know the history of that.

Pretty much spot on.

I would remark here - Engines are worse offenders for this sort of thing. Leave Unity for a month or so and it may not ever be able to rebuild that old project correctly. Bring on the pain! Engines like Unity etc I always felt the contempt of the company for types like us, you would need some top tier tech support options with a matching price tag to get any non trivial support. They are too arrogant to deal with. No thanks, I like to know exactly where+why my code is breaking and debug at a low level.

I generally avoid libraries if possible unless they really bring a lot to the table, as in the case with the UI library I use.
Self contained libraries that don't reference other libraries, e.g. maths libraries are also quite welcome.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Prologue first draft of map is done!
Over 30 scenes, spanning the starting continent.
Each scene is about generally about 100x100m. Some smaller.
That's almost 1 million square meters.

This content represents 1 quarter of the game.
The main game, will be over 100 scenes, of varying sizes.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Shot this late, I'm quite tired. Anyway.
I want somewhat "large" cities. I'd like animals too eventually. And perhaps some basic behaviours.
The insides of the buildings will all be potentially enterable yet mostly generic (simple enough to do).
The overall world is essentially a large placeholder needs a lot more detail, which I'll cover later about the art approach I've decided on.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I will NEVER EVER use Unity for development. They are filthy scammers (I do use it for the convenience of minor maintenance tasks however). Woke Godot, etc and can also flush him/herself down the toilet.

ah that explains it. Look the CoC doesn't apply to me anyway I'm not going to bother with their community of snowflakes, I think your criticisms are valid. Unity and Unreal are just as woke, they just hide it, but if you read anything by their teams its pretty obvious. Meanwhile, I also use 3DCoat sometimes and that has a pro-Christian Eula so entirely on the other side, I paid that guy money lol. I dunno maybe we need to stop using game dev tools as a platform for politics, yeah developers can be unbearable idiots sometimes. I use what I can, the only reason I'm not using Unreal is that I don't like or trust Tencent but if Unity and Godot died tomorrow I'd probably use that then. If they all died, then SDL.

Unity's Woke CoC:
https://s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/fil...e/Unity_Global_Code_of_Conduct_and_Ethics.pdf

Epic's Woke CoC:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/epic-cplusplus-coding-standard-for-unreal-engine/
Can't even use the word Nuke lol.
They all do it.

I have trialed many engines and no engine that I tried, has come close in terms of isometric functionality for my needs

I would agree there. Most isometric-capable engines have gigantic limitations and aren't fit for that purpose, either they're 3D with orthographic projection so not all that useful if you're doing mainly pre-rendered or they're 2D and can't handle a Z-vector at all so you end up having to do all the Z-sorting manually and it just turns into a nightmare.
Custom engine makes sense especially if pre-rendered which is what you're doing. I wish you luck that's a hard thing to do and it looks like you've gotten pretty far into development with that approach.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Prototyping some new art. Of course its quite rough now, I am also planning something big.
Big landscapes and very large building cutaways.
I want to mostly do away with indoor scenes unless its something like a new area such as a castle interior.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

Looks p. shit, ngl

 

[gaussgunner]

Geneforge vibes

The only major problem is the grass around the castle blending in with the grass below. It doesn't look like a mountain.

 

[J1M]

Do you still need UI code? I wrote a UI system for XNA 4 that should be compatible with mono.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Geneforge vibes

The only major problem is the grass around the castle blending in with the grass below. It doesn't look like a mountain.

I was actually trying to very much not look like geneforge. The environment is highly dynamic and not flat tile based, large mountains, hills, caves, forrests. And so on. But I guess I have some way to go to changing that perception. If you can pick out what it is, I would be interested to know.

 

[gaussgunner]

The_Sloth_Sleeps It's the amount of green.

 

[Crispy]

Hey man, I don't know a fuckin' thing about game development, and this is the first time I've ever even looked at this thread, but from 2017 until now -- from that first screenshot you posted compared to what you've shown in the last page or two -- it looks like you've come a damned long way.

For what it's worth, keep going. Even if it takes you another six years, I think you might be on to something.

Your voice is irritating, though. I can't stand you weirdo Europeans.

 

[Surf Solar]

Prototyping some new art. Of course its quite rough now, I am also planning something big.
Big landscapes and very large building cutaways.
I want to mostly do away with indoor scenes unless its something like a new area such as a castle interior.

This looks fantastic and instantly revokes feelings I had for cRPGs in the 90ies.

As a suggestion, the grass edge on the plateau where the building is to the east could use some bevel and emboss on its edges to make it stand out more like its a proper "height". And on the opposite, the cliff edges to the west have a bit of a harsh black edge to them, some opacity would help.


All in all I still love the art and would instantly buy a game with this style!

If you want some help with some textures and hand painting stuff on iso maps, hit me up, I can help you.

 

[Crispy]

More nitpicking: your sense of scale is off quite a bit. That tree is nearly as large as the entire castle! In fact, taking perspective into account, since the castle is closer to the viewer, that tree must truly be gargantuan!

 

[ds]

Giant fantastical trees are incline. The width of the roads would be more of an issue, especially for the side path that does to the tree. That is if the art was going for realism which it doesn't seem to be - the whole thing looks a bit like a painting.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

It is indeed a giant tree. Perhaps too giant. I am actually not entirely sure what projection this is however we can assume that all objects are always the same scale. I test this by the man sprite.

I see what you mean by the palette, that's a bit too cheerful and Vogelesque, which I don't want.

Surf Solar I can share the source files if you want to try changing anything.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

You should put more rocks in it

 

[Surf Solar]

It is indeed a giant tree. Perhaps too giant. I am actually not entirely sure what projection this is however we can assume that all objects are always the same scale. I test this by the man sprite.

I see what you mean by the palette, that's a bit too cheerful and Vogelesque, which I don't want.

Surf Solar I can share the source files if you want to try changing anything.

I used to work on a game until it got shut down for various reasons, but map making and editing art assets was always enjoyable. As I said, just send me some stuff and I'll try to help.

 

[d1nolore]

How far do you think you are from a working game or demo?

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

How far do you think you are from a working game or demo?

Surf Solar I sent you some files. I tried desperately hard last summer to make a demo, but I didn't get there.
Now, I really want to get it out by this autumn, not a large demo, but a first concept demo.
I have to balance working and other things but I really need to get it something out soon, for feedback purposes.
I have already started working several hours everyday on this. First I need to sort the combat out, then the UI.
There are other features I need to complete, the level editor, scripting engine, but that can be done after.
So, 3 months from a private demo. We will take it from there after.

 

[gaussgunner]

It is indeed a giant tree. Perhaps too giant. I am actually not entirely sure what projection this is however we can assume that all objects are always the same scale. I test this by the man sprite.

Orthographic projection. There's no perspective, it's not realistic, but it works fine. You just might want to exaggerate things like the castle to give the illusion of perspective.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Been working with the flu all last week. Started on adding some party members. Still going over combat, which I will go over a few more times.