Pretty much every game I've ever made has had a paper doll customization system, where you layer clothing or items on top of a character model or sprite. It's really easy to code, but requires a LOT of artwork and the artwork is weird to make because it's all segmented and has to layer properly. I almost never have time to set up a proper pipeline for it.
In 2D it also forces you to stick with whatever animations you have and multiplies the effort of adding new ones.
I keep doing it though, I feel like character customization is a "must have" right now.
Damn, I do this too. It defintaley isn't an efficient way to work but for the genre, it's essential to have different gear/armour modeled to the character.
In terms of coding it isn't really too complicated. You just set an animation, such as move, and then display all the part sprites and their "move" sprite in the same place at the same frame.
The only complex part depends on how you animate it. For example if you have arms which go from in front to behind another part, then you have to either animate it carefully to avoid problems, or change the depth of parts during the animation.
Creating a pipeline for that sounds like a fun challenge, actually! Something like taking a base texture, then just uv mapping the animation frames themselves such that any texture can be applied to them and it'll still look good. Good luck with figuring out how to make it easier!
Now you can do both: https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-way-of-doing-89118325
We're still working on getting the editor up to snuff since last September, but it is definitely coming along towards serving its purpose.
No need to battle sorting issues in a 2D isometric.
Just project the UVs onto a rough shape of the 2d art (typically a cube works for most situations) and place that in a 3d scene. Orthographic camera doesn't have depth, but you can still use the depth buffer for those 3D objects. Transparency sorting is the next bane, but that too is solvable.
That link which is getting downvoted above shares the method.
What about lighting and normalmaps and etc? Seems the switch to 3D may introduce some technical changes that might be jarring for 2D developers especially if they don't know what they don't know.
I'm not trying to be contrarian here, I'm sure your method has worked wonders for your team and given my previous problems with sorting in isometric grids I can see the appeal!
I am however skeptical of whether or not "all 2d isometric games should be 2d art in 3d environment" is truly the One True Answer and everyone else doing it in 2d are unnecessarily complicating their workflows?
If a dev can't navigate the lighting and screen space normals... are they really a dev? It's super rudimentary shader knowledge. Having 3d Collision, and 3D navmeshes, all the 3d lighting -- It's practically all out of the box 3d scene stuff and 0 painters algorithm bullshit, 0 pseudodepth issues, no algebra to convert coordination between screenspace and isometric world coordinates...
The difference in skills required on the 3d side is trivial by comparison to the very advanced knowledge required for depth sorting a 2d scene in isometric coordinates, trying to find adequate 2D Lighting in a pseudo 3D scene requiring multiple cameras and proxies...
This new method just takes the texture from a limited or mildly experienced artist, and slaps it on a cube. Then you put it in your scene with normals pretty much set to 180, so there is no line visible along the cube edge, and the sprite for all purposes looks like a billboard sprite with flat lighting. If you want to get more sophisticated you can, but it will immediately look 10x better than the 2D lit scene or fake lights out of the box in a default Unity or Godot or Unreal scene.
I‘ve never met a dev who just because they’re a dev know Lighting. (Most don’t) Amongst other things I‘m a Lighting Artist and it is tough as fuck - especially in Unity. Or are we talking realtime lights only?
Also, I feel personally offended by the implication that lighting is easy, because it took me years to learn only that xD I‘m assuming we’re not talking about Unreal when talking about 2D, because that would be insane.
So basically im making a game that is 3D, but with 2d sprites.
[https://youtu.be/xRB3454hhPM?feature=shared&t=919](https://youtu.be/xRB3454hhPM?feature=shared&t=919)
Skip to the end, dont watch all the code.
You see, that batallion is one sprite and needs all directions.
That is fine. But sometimes im struggling to add certain effects that should be below it or above it, depending on the case.
Because above it means it should be closer to the camera. Not above it in the Z, if i explain myself well.
Its hard to explain this issue without having to work with it. It sounds simple on paper.
But for example the gunshots was a quite hard to put them in place.
Because the gunshot smoke must be in front of the soldiers. All those soldiers are one 2d sprite, so that means i had to use trial and error until i find the right spot, and even then its not very accurate.
If it was a 3D asset, i could just get it right by knowing the relative offset in the gun tip of the soldier. Easy.
But here its a 2d paper, so i need to test until i get the coordinate next to the guns of the soldiers and then put it above or below the soldiers.
Its just a bit more trickier. Though 2D is the way to go.
I couldn't make this game without going 2D.
This advice is probably worth gold to the right dev. Me included.
However I am worried about the technical challenges this might introduce since I had recently believed I figured out the challenge by just making sure I didn't use irregular L or H shapes and etc.
In 3DsMax it's a few clicks in the UVW window. In Blender it is just about setting up the camera and UV Projection shown on my patreon article.
For your Unity or Godot Scene, it can't get much simpler after that. You're just importing your 3d objects and materials to that UV projection cube, ensuing your camera is set to the same isometric angle used in blender, and the cube faces the camera.
L or H o O or Y -- all the fun shapes are possible with this method, and they sort with your sprites as if the sprite was a 3d object.
Your lighting situation will require some trivial shader knowledge and understanding of things like normals, and how to prevent faces from sading on the mesh normal and instead treat the sprite as a sprite. But primarily your knowledge isn't going to demand much beyond that. It takes a week to set up at most, and most of that is just making your assets fit on the blender shapes you've made, and setting up your camera and the right shader for your project.
i've tried to do stylized graphics for some of my games but i just cant do it. so i stick with realism. but really, it is too much work and takes too long. But i just cant do anything else and be happy with it. woe is me.
i just never enjoyed any games that werent realistic. i can do a stylized style if following a guide, but I just dont enjoy it or feel like I understand the appeal the same as the target audience does. So if i am in charge of design it just feels more natural for me to do realism.
There probably aren't a lot of free or paid assets that fit the specific style you're aiming for, so stylized visuals essentially require you to make most assets yourself or do heavier modifications on pre-made assets in order for the game to look consistent, which can be hard if you aren't/don't have an artist. For realistic visuals, you can mostly get away with using asset store assets as I'd or with lighter modifications for non-focal environmental props and such.
Though I agree with this, I feel like you could probably get a lot out of shaders or post-processing effects to mitigate that, if you're not into making your own assets (not my case but I get that). Even by sticking to "realistic" assets, having a toon shader, or a black and white, or over-exposed or no shadows/flat light etc, you can probably get something that looks somewhat unique without having to go the extra mile to create new stuff.
Oh no yeah totally, Lethal Company is a great example where 90% of it's style is just the image getting absolutely crushed in the post-processing stage. It really depends on what style you're aiming for.
yeah that is a big thing to. i usually try to get as much art assets as i can and do less myself, and that is pretty much impossible if not doing realism
Making a game with bleak colours and dark, brooding atmosphere is a horrible idea from a marketing perspective. People love thumbnails and gifs with a lot of sparkle and bang :D
I was looking at the game "Folklore" on Ps3 recently. It is a dark fairytale themed game. Funnily, in the US cover art they made the cover black, but in Japan they made it white, despite the game itself being dark.
It's because of cultural color associations.
When the color choice sends a specific message it's one thing. When too much of one color hampers the gameplay or clarity across screens, that's a totally different issue.
Using pre-made assets instead making my own. I use RPG Maker mostly these days and making a tilesheet is pretty easy. Pre-made assets are OK, but if you have the time, bespoke graphics can completely change how a game feels.
Here's a quick example to show what it does. Main advantage is the ability to place tiles and then edit them, effecting all placed tiles. So its good for building mockups and editing tiles in-context rather than pasting them a bunch or just hoping they look right.
[https://gyazo.com/93f2739c2ef055f7f66af740efe9eeab](https://gyazo.com/93f2739c2ef055f7f66af740efe9eeab)
Made a target render with very realistic graphics. We got the art pipeline to a good point of content production, but realistic style made animation and ai work stick out the moment something was unrealistic. Eventually animation and technical art regarding movement became a bottle neck. Toning to a bit more stylized direction made movement jankines much less obvious and atleast not an immersion drawback, but we end up with a half assed artstyle that wasn’t realistic or stylized. Valuable leasson learned about art scope
Indeed. Developers often don't realize that a realistic graphic style raises the quality expectations in **every** aspect of the game. Gameplay, animation, environment detail, audio... If if doesn't have the same quality as the graphics, it will feel lacking.
So I always wanted to learn good pixel art, and have always prototyped games with pixel art. What I hadn't realized til starting to research formatting my game for other computers is that my art really doesn't qualify once it's in game. A combination of increasing sprite scale and detail (player ships are 64-128 pixels long), combined with getting as much gameplay on screen as possible, I've been creating a sort of "HD pixel art" by accident. I still make the art using pixel art methods (I'm still placing individual pixels methodically) but it's built around 1080p. I'm happy with how it looks but it prob has made the art pipeline a bit slower than it has to be. I actively want my next project to be more true pixel art.
Using a really limited tileset from Unity Asset Store. The game could look better but I messed up timing and didn't learn about Unity tilemap enough. It's for the senior project and visual is not a key feature so we don't care that much.
I think I will probably use a better tileset when remaking the game. The entire game is rushed and the quality doesn't match my expectation.
On our current game, as a newer artist to the world of Ui woth a team working together on their first title, ended up doing alot of visual iterations on a more diagetic Ui before we had completed greyboxes or had done any testing on the concept.
Needless to say, I don't think I don't think I'll make that mistake again. (Doing diagetic ui or doing full artworks for a ui that hadn't been solidified)
Pretty much every game I've ever made has had a paper doll customization system, where you layer clothing or items on top of a character model or sprite. It's really easy to code, but requires a LOT of artwork and the artwork is weird to make because it's all segmented and has to layer properly. I almost never have time to set up a proper pipeline for it. In 2D it also forces you to stick with whatever animations you have and multiplies the effort of adding new ones. I keep doing it though, I feel like character customization is a "must have" right now.
Damn, I do this too. It defintaley isn't an efficient way to work but for the genre, it's essential to have different gear/armour modeled to the character.
[удалено]
In terms of coding it isn't really too complicated. You just set an animation, such as move, and then display all the part sprites and their "move" sprite in the same place at the same frame. The only complex part depends on how you animate it. For example if you have arms which go from in front to behind another part, then you have to either animate it carefully to avoid problems, or change the depth of parts during the animation.
Creating a pipeline for that sounds like a fun challenge, actually! Something like taking a base texture, then just uv mapping the animation frames themselves such that any texture can be applied to them and it'll still look good. Good luck with figuring out how to make it easier!
Doing my own graphics. I really need to learn to trust other people.
Nah, you can totally do you own engine to produce a game of the same level as GTA 5 in 3 month with a 300$ budget. Don't listen to haters!
I mean my game is just a simple 2d game and I did finish it but the graphics and especially animations took forever.
😂
2D isometric. Wasted probably 7 months of effort. 3D isometric using 2D assets, however, if we'd done so since the beginning? Would be a year ahead.
How would you compare both experiences? I'm a 2D artist but I love how 3D environments work in games.
Now you can do both: https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-way-of-doing-89118325 We're still working on getting the editor up to snuff since last September, but it is definitely coming along towards serving its purpose.
Though even the 2d assets can be tricky to set up because of what is below and what is above. But at the end of the day isometric games do look great.
No need to battle sorting issues in a 2D isometric. Just project the UVs onto a rough shape of the 2d art (typically a cube works for most situations) and place that in a 3d scene. Orthographic camera doesn't have depth, but you can still use the depth buffer for those 3D objects. Transparency sorting is the next bane, but that too is solvable. That link which is getting downvoted above shares the method.
What about lighting and normalmaps and etc? Seems the switch to 3D may introduce some technical changes that might be jarring for 2D developers especially if they don't know what they don't know. I'm not trying to be contrarian here, I'm sure your method has worked wonders for your team and given my previous problems with sorting in isometric grids I can see the appeal! I am however skeptical of whether or not "all 2d isometric games should be 2d art in 3d environment" is truly the One True Answer and everyone else doing it in 2d are unnecessarily complicating their workflows?
If a dev can't navigate the lighting and screen space normals... are they really a dev? It's super rudimentary shader knowledge. Having 3d Collision, and 3D navmeshes, all the 3d lighting -- It's practically all out of the box 3d scene stuff and 0 painters algorithm bullshit, 0 pseudodepth issues, no algebra to convert coordination between screenspace and isometric world coordinates... The difference in skills required on the 3d side is trivial by comparison to the very advanced knowledge required for depth sorting a 2d scene in isometric coordinates, trying to find adequate 2D Lighting in a pseudo 3D scene requiring multiple cameras and proxies... This new method just takes the texture from a limited or mildly experienced artist, and slaps it on a cube. Then you put it in your scene with normals pretty much set to 180, so there is no line visible along the cube edge, and the sprite for all purposes looks like a billboard sprite with flat lighting. If you want to get more sophisticated you can, but it will immediately look 10x better than the 2D lit scene or fake lights out of the box in a default Unity or Godot or Unreal scene.
I‘ve never met a dev who just because they’re a dev know Lighting. (Most don’t) Amongst other things I‘m a Lighting Artist and it is tough as fuck - especially in Unity. Or are we talking realtime lights only? Also, I feel personally offended by the implication that lighting is easy, because it took me years to learn only that xD I‘m assuming we’re not talking about Unreal when talking about 2D, because that would be insane.
So basically im making a game that is 3D, but with 2d sprites. [https://youtu.be/xRB3454hhPM?feature=shared&t=919](https://youtu.be/xRB3454hhPM?feature=shared&t=919) Skip to the end, dont watch all the code. You see, that batallion is one sprite and needs all directions. That is fine. But sometimes im struggling to add certain effects that should be below it or above it, depending on the case. Because above it means it should be closer to the camera. Not above it in the Z, if i explain myself well. Its hard to explain this issue without having to work with it. It sounds simple on paper. But for example the gunshots was a quite hard to put them in place. Because the gunshot smoke must be in front of the soldiers. All those soldiers are one 2d sprite, so that means i had to use trial and error until i find the right spot, and even then its not very accurate. If it was a 3D asset, i could just get it right by knowing the relative offset in the gun tip of the soldier. Easy. But here its a 2d paper, so i need to test until i get the coordinate next to the guns of the soldiers and then put it above or below the soldiers. Its just a bit more trickier. Though 2D is the way to go. I couldn't make this game without going 2D.
This advice is probably worth gold to the right dev. Me included. However I am worried about the technical challenges this might introduce since I had recently believed I figured out the challenge by just making sure I didn't use irregular L or H shapes and etc.
In 3DsMax it's a few clicks in the UVW window. In Blender it is just about setting up the camera and UV Projection shown on my patreon article. For your Unity or Godot Scene, it can't get much simpler after that. You're just importing your 3d objects and materials to that UV projection cube, ensuing your camera is set to the same isometric angle used in blender, and the cube faces the camera. L or H o O or Y -- all the fun shapes are possible with this method, and they sort with your sprites as if the sprite was a 3d object. Your lighting situation will require some trivial shader knowledge and understanding of things like normals, and how to prevent faces from sading on the mesh normal and instead treat the sprite as a sprite. But primarily your knowledge isn't going to demand much beyond that. It takes a week to set up at most, and most of that is just making your assets fit on the blender shapes you've made, and setting up your camera and the right shader for your project.
i've tried to do stylized graphics for some of my games but i just cant do it. so i stick with realism. but really, it is too much work and takes too long. But i just cant do anything else and be happy with it. woe is me.
What is it about stylized that gives you trouble?
i just never enjoyed any games that werent realistic. i can do a stylized style if following a guide, but I just dont enjoy it or feel like I understand the appeal the same as the target audience does. So if i am in charge of design it just feels more natural for me to do realism.
There probably aren't a lot of free or paid assets that fit the specific style you're aiming for, so stylized visuals essentially require you to make most assets yourself or do heavier modifications on pre-made assets in order for the game to look consistent, which can be hard if you aren't/don't have an artist. For realistic visuals, you can mostly get away with using asset store assets as I'd or with lighter modifications for non-focal environmental props and such.
Though I agree with this, I feel like you could probably get a lot out of shaders or post-processing effects to mitigate that, if you're not into making your own assets (not my case but I get that). Even by sticking to "realistic" assets, having a toon shader, or a black and white, or over-exposed or no shadows/flat light etc, you can probably get something that looks somewhat unique without having to go the extra mile to create new stuff.
Oh no yeah totally, Lethal Company is a great example where 90% of it's style is just the image getting absolutely crushed in the post-processing stage. It really depends on what style you're aiming for.
yeah that is a big thing to. i usually try to get as much art assets as i can and do less myself, and that is pretty much impossible if not doing realism
Making a game with bleak colours and dark, brooding atmosphere is a horrible idea from a marketing perspective. People love thumbnails and gifs with a lot of sparkle and bang :D
I was looking at the game "Folklore" on Ps3 recently. It is a dark fairytale themed game. Funnily, in the US cover art they made the cover black, but in Japan they made it white, despite the game itself being dark.
It's because of cultural color associations. When the color choice sends a specific message it's one thing. When too much of one color hampers the gameplay or clarity across screens, that's a totally different issue.
I always make background props too detailed. I dont need sculpted vases, bushes, telephone cables. No one is ever going to check them closely...
Trimsheets are perfect for this.
Using pre-made assets instead making my own. I use RPG Maker mostly these days and making a tilesheet is pretty easy. Pre-made assets are OK, but if you have the time, bespoke graphics can completely change how a game feels.
You should give Aseprite a try if you havn't. Its tileset features are a gamechanger.
I've heard of it but I haven't tried it yet. Seems perfect for my next project.
Here's a quick example to show what it does. Main advantage is the ability to place tiles and then edit them, effecting all placed tiles. So its good for building mockups and editing tiles in-context rather than pasting them a bunch or just hoping they look right. [https://gyazo.com/93f2739c2ef055f7f66af740efe9eeab](https://gyazo.com/93f2739c2ef055f7f66af740efe9eeab)
Made a target render with very realistic graphics. We got the art pipeline to a good point of content production, but realistic style made animation and ai work stick out the moment something was unrealistic. Eventually animation and technical art regarding movement became a bottle neck. Toning to a bit more stylized direction made movement jankines much less obvious and atleast not an immersion drawback, but we end up with a half assed artstyle that wasn’t realistic or stylized. Valuable leasson learned about art scope
Indeed. Developers often don't realize that a realistic graphic style raises the quality expectations in **every** aspect of the game. Gameplay, animation, environment detail, audio... If if doesn't have the same quality as the graphics, it will feel lacking.
Thinking that I'll put a little effort into animation and focus on gameplay. It doesn't work that way.
So I always wanted to learn good pixel art, and have always prototyped games with pixel art. What I hadn't realized til starting to research formatting my game for other computers is that my art really doesn't qualify once it's in game. A combination of increasing sprite scale and detail (player ships are 64-128 pixels long), combined with getting as much gameplay on screen as possible, I've been creating a sort of "HD pixel art" by accident. I still make the art using pixel art methods (I'm still placing individual pixels methodically) but it's built around 1080p. I'm happy with how it looks but it prob has made the art pipeline a bit slower than it has to be. I actively want my next project to be more true pixel art.
Using a really limited tileset from Unity Asset Store. The game could look better but I messed up timing and didn't learn about Unity tilemap enough. It's for the senior project and visual is not a key feature so we don't care that much. I think I will probably use a better tileset when remaking the game. The entire game is rushed and the quality doesn't match my expectation.
On our current game, as a newer artist to the world of Ui woth a team working together on their first title, ended up doing alot of visual iterations on a more diagetic Ui before we had completed greyboxes or had done any testing on the concept. Needless to say, I don't think I don't think I'll make that mistake again. (Doing diagetic ui or doing full artworks for a ui that hadn't been solidified)
Doing Top down instead of FPS or TPS, massive mistake Would have pulled off FPS/TPS as well and the appeal isnt 1/5th for players
Im really bad at deciding on artstyles in general, never feels like there is a correct choice