Tips for an isometric game

We've decided with out team that it's finally time to start our first serious game project. We'll be targeting Steam and we're designing an isometric game. Since it's our first iso game (but not our first game overall) I'd like to ask the wise community of Construct 2 about tips, suggestions for making an isometric game. I think we'll be using R0J0hound 's Isometric Behavior and I just saw tunepunk 's Archer I tought it might be a good idea to ask around.

check my "guide" and stuff here:

https://www.scirra.com/store/royalty-fr ... plate-1527

it's isometric <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

there's a demo link there, works just tried it. it was made for PC but just a template with 1 level, didn't have time to do more or realease a game, it's a good starting point <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

When sorting, only sort what's on-screen. Also try to keep stuff that is permanently under the player or permanently above on their own layers--it will make mapping much easier. Remember that things like houses don't need to be one giant object if you don't want. So long as your object count isn't out of control, you can get a lot of flexibility and control out of splitting things up. Oh just, animations might take forever to make because of all the angles.

I don't know if I have any specific tips at the moment, but feel free to watch any videos I posted in my game thread in my sig.

Boom

The new system z sort may be fast enough that you may not need any filtering.

I got 1800 sprites being sorted every tick before it started to slow down.

yep make sure your object count is below 1000.

there is a lot of methods to help you with that including tilemaps.

I learn that the hard way.

if making animations is giving you trouble, you might as well abuse Bastard Bond tactics of simply using no animations and only tween/litetweens of the sprites.

I didn't do traditional isoletric on a grid, as i wanted a bit more dynamic map with objects and buildings in any angles. A bit more tricky to figure out the sorting but got it working eventally. For grid I think its a bit more easy, but as been mentioned. Make use of tilemap object, to keep the object count down.

My isometric behavior is only useful if you're using 2:1 isometric and want to sort blocks of any dimension in any location. They also have to be oriented the same. In sort it uses an algorithm that addresses cases that aren't easily sortable. While it also provides some helpers for the collisions and motion those can be done in many other ways.

If you're doing everything on a ground plane or on a grid then the behavior is overkill and newt's suggestion is better suited.

I got my inspiration from games like "commandos" and Baldur's Gate type games, which is isometric but not grid based. Like Transport tycoon. More dynamic maps, but still isometric angle. I also wanted to make the characters full realtime 3D in an isometric prerendered setting, but after buying Q3D i found it was way to complicated to work with, so I skipped that idea :p

Image from commandos 3. Harder to do than grid based but I nice without the squares.

yep make sure your object count is below 1000.

there is a lot of methods to help you with that including tilemaps.

I learn that the hard way.

if making animations is giving you trouble, you might as well abuse Bastard Bond tactics of simply using no animations and only tween/litetweens of the sprites.

Perhaps 1,000 actively-sorted objects at a time is what was meant. If you're aiming for Steam, you can go much higher (10x that) if they're not all actively doing stuff. So non-moving scenery stuff, for instance.

Is my understanding correct that there aren't any tilemap-based isometric methods currently available?

You can, but it's pretty complicated graphically, and it would only be for backgrounds, or foregrounds that don't require z sorting.

isometric view: is possible, but not easy. I think the most of the C2 users gave up, because this is too complicate.

for 2.5D or 3D you have to look for another software: buildbox has a video in YouTube with a isometric sample (but I have no idea how it works) but games like the screenshot you posted is made with unity3d, autodesk stingray or another high professional game engine.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I think I'll go with the built in sorting method newt suggested. The layer and optimization tips will also sure be handy. We are aiming for a minimalist graphics style so animations are currently not a concern.

I ran the possible logic in my head today (I didn't have the time to try it in a prototype yet). However I'm still not sure how I'll get the "walking behind buildings" part work. Does the sorting take care of this as well? Or should I carefully assign the origin point of each object for the sorting to handle this? We're still not sure about the angle we're going to use for the images..

Regarding collisions, is it enough if I just set the collision polygon for the base square of a building?

Maybe my old video on level construction in my isometric game will give you some ideas on how I built everything and some of the challenges. And yes, everything has to be broken into small pieces with the origin point at the base of the object for sorting.