Isometric games on Scirra Construct 2

Hello,

I'm looking forward to hear what do you think about this idea?

My goal next year is make a game called Aequilibrium using isometric. By instance, you can see the Deathtrash (https://deathtrashgame.tumblr.com/) artwork and have an idea of what I'm talking about.

My last isometric game was "Once upon an apocalypse", but I give up it after a leak where the game was played more than 100.000 times, but sold only 30 copies on Google Play, giving me a huge financial loss.

This time I'll focus on an game with Server side to store the inventory and other things, making a login system to avoid piracy, or, at least making a kickstarter campaign to help fund the development.

The game will be a survival isometric pixelart game, where you'll be able to survive with realistic system of hunger, thirst, tiredness, cold, wet, calories, etc. The system will be a mix of Long Dark, but more realistic when talking about eating, sleeping, etc.

The scenario will be on a post-apocalypse world, starting your character in an Space Arc on the Moon, and you'll be able to develop your character and earn skills like Ultima Online to build things and repair it, also, you'll play along a story, learning what happened to the Earth and soon.

Aequilibrium is an old objective of my life, I have tried to release it in many platforms already, like Comics, Books and Paints, but nothing is completely satisfying my desire to see it as it need to be.

So, what do you think about this game becoming a C2 project? Or it's better to jump into Unity?

As long as it doesn't use a ton of frames for directions then it's quite doable.

Does it require pathfinding?

As long as it doesn't use a ton of frames for directions then it's quite doable.

Does it require pathfinding?

Hi Newt, I miss your dog avatar =D

Well, pathfinding will surely be needed and is one of the things I'm worried of =

But the most important is the shuffling of Z order in areas like towns with NPCs and objects.

My idea for the player is make a character composed of multiple parts, like head, chest, arms and legs, where I'll work with each one in separated animations to keep the number of necessary frames low and increase the variety of pants, weapons and equipments.

Important NPCs will have only the most needed animations like walk, run and stand, meanwhile enemies will have the same behavior of the player to attack, for example, plus, they will have some randomization on their body parts.

This is what can slowdown the game, because a single enemy will have four sprites being shuffled in the Z order everytick.

To reduce the amount of animations, I'll use only two orientations, diagonal front and back. It's something like my template, but simpler and smaller.

So, I keep looking forward to read more replies!

Well the pathfinding behavior that comes with C2 is not real great with iso, but there are some good third party plugs that will do fine.

Some advice from my own experience: Z-order every 2 or 3 ticks and only object that are on screen or within a distance. You wont notice it. You will have to Zorder all first, then set to front limbs and other parts that are suppose to be in front of parent objects. As for the amount of enemies on screen, just don't have to many of them on it, and try not to process them outside of the screen. But keep in mind that you can't do any transformations of pinned objects, so what i do, every second or less, i pin other parts of characters that are off screen, and when they come back on screen i unpin those and other events set them to their place. Loads of messing about really. I wish construct would have some tools to create entities from several objects. Anyway, it's doable. As for pathfinding, you have an option to create game on a grid, and use A*, but even the behavior shouldn't put too much pressure on the performance. You could switch between pathfinding and other movement behavior depending on circumstance.

But here's what most annoying will be for ya, and that's collisions with solid environment. This is a nightmare right now for isometric games. Using any of available plugins will give you poor results: it will bounce your character or it will move it at nearest angle but at different speeds. So i created my own collision system, a long one, that checks offset. I only did that for player, but will have to figure out how to make it general now. This is the only way I could get normal resoults, making player

I have also one for the pad, but that one is different. It was even harder to come up with

And btw, someone generous could turn this in to a plugin, so we finally have something NORMAL for collisions.

Also, if you want some distopian soundscapes, I'd can write some gritty, grainy tracks.

I'm currently developing an Isometric RPG.

I found creating my own custom movement and isometric display logic gave the best results.

Heres the code for Isometric display (also a tutorial I wrote on it here), it's actually very very simple. And the key to performance is the line "Is On Screen"

As for the movement, it's not too difficult. Basically I use a "Collision" sprite, and on collisison with it I simply set my Global Movement Speed to 0. Because it's a custom movement, it works really well for both players and NPC's.

As for the movement, it's not too difficult. Basically I use a "Collision" sprite, and on collisison with it I simply set my Global Movement Speed to 0. Because it's a custom movement, it works really well for both players and NPC's.

Can you move player normally after it collides ? Isn't it easy to break?

megatronix I haven't had any issues with the current script. I did have bugs like wall glitching and getting stuck. But I've been testing this current method for 2 months now.. Seems solid.

The idea is that as soon as I contact, I set speed to 0. Then once I release the input key, I set the speed back. No getting stuck! I also have a strict 4 directional movement, so it could be to do with that...

The code is this:

Thanks for the advice, I'll look into the collisions with more attention, there is a lot of issues dealing with isometric in C2.

Well, Once Upon An Apocalypse has been stopped for years and today I was looking my old and dusted files, what a good memorie and great effort to make that simple prototype.

I hate how I leave this game unfinished after it get greenlit, but in that time we were unable to work with Steam (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =162373421).

Well, zombies and pixelart are two things who stick very well together, so, if I still unemployed for the next weeks, I'll work on it just to relax and test the isometric template as well =]

http://www.indiedb.com/games/zombie-apoc

The way i did it for my sim game was to have the tiles on a bottom layer, then another layer above for the buildings and people. I kept it simple by putting only the buildings and shadows into a family to z order. Once i sorted them i then picked each of the shadows child character by storing the characters uid in the parent shadow and moving it above its shadow. This means no matter where the child is it is always correct to the parent. Notice how the people characters can bounce, and how the ships are also correct and building icons too with no worry for origin points.

Sorry for poor quality.

wow mOOnpunk having the seperate object (in your case shadows) handling the Z-Order is brilliant! Allows much more freedom of animation in the characters!

wow mOOnpunk having the seperate object (in your case shadows) handling the Z-Order is brilliant! Allows much more freedom of animation in the characters!

Yeah, classic. Also, if its grid based, you don't need any collisions at all, you just check position on the array against other solids on the array

I don't use any collision detection in the game, and it doesnt matter if its not grid based, you can just use sort by y position ascending.

I don't use any collision detection in the game, and it doesnt matter if its not grid based, you can just use sort by y position ascending.

This is what I do too..

[quote:rrixuc3e]but I give up it after a leak

What do you mean? What happened?