2.5D

[Ellie]

I think that's the right term.

How do you handle depth in 2D games? Or rather, as the topic for this thread, his can we create it?

We have scripts for bridges you can walk over and under, which is a start. But how can we create a feel that a platform is higher than another?

You could "fall off" edges and climb cliffs. Perhaps weather effects so that the camera enters the clouds as it moves upwards.

Diving, falling, swimming. What are your thoughts?

 

[Xilef]

I add 1 frame of delay into the input system of a game every time someone writes "2.5D".

Isometric beats 3/4 view for communicating 3D. I've shown isometric screenshots and had people say "ah! 3D!". Issue is, isometric view can fail if you have geometry that the player can walk behind - the top of the geometry might blend with the floor level the player is at.

3/4 view has this issue too, but gains the benefit of having more artistic freedom to better communicate what's going on (it is already an illogical view perspective, so can get away with trading logic for readability).

The big problem people hit when trying to communicate height in 3/4 view is the Y axis on the screen. Walking up the screen does nothing at all to communicate height change. The SNES Final Fantasy games do a good job with cliffs and mountains; these games make the player walk left/right on the cliff, with thin paths, but tall mountain walls. In Final Fantasy V and VI you had to enter caves if you wanted to go up to the next level of the mountain (so the player would almost never walk "upward" on the screen Y axis). Add in a pretty parallax picture and then you've got easy mountain/cliffs. The Celes suicide scene in FF6 is side-on.

Actually now that I think about it, even the buildings in FF6's Zozo force you to only really move side to side (or back inside the building), so even these go "side-on" for conveying height. Same deal with the mage tower. So if you want to show someone jumping and changing height, don't do it up/down on the Y axis - always do it sideways (diving into water? Make them dive to the left/right). Phantom train was side-on also, with a horizon. I bet the train would look rather flat and not tall at all if someone stuck it in a normal map.

Sword of Mana on the GBA comes to mind as one of the worst games for conveying height changes. Jumping onto ledges felt like a guessing game (is this really a ledge or is it land I can't reach?). Spent so much time jumping at walls just in case a ledge was reachable.

Graphically, point of references are good for height. Put a tall tree at the bottom of a cliff to show that the wall is definitely "going up".

I would guess most people would just stack stuff on the Z layer (into the screen). Have a parallax map that shows a tiny town in the distance from top-down perspective (so no horizon visible) or dim the lower layers if you change height - I consider these lazy and not very effective. Have a horizon, have it side-on.


I really like the idea of zooming the camera through clouds. Maybe that could work for trees in a forest somehow. That could work for diving into water too - zoom the camera into the water and fade to black.

 

[coyotecraft]

In RPG Maker games I usually see this thing were enemies are wandering around by the edge of a cliff or upper floor of a castle. And because there's nothing really distinguishing height, the player and event can interact and "touch" when side by side even though they should be on different floors.

I kinda made a simple solution to this in RMXP by storing the player's terrarin tag in a variable and having the monster events switch pages based on the variable. So when the player is on the 1st floor for example, the events on the 2nd floor are turned to an inert page that won't try to approach the player of start a battle until the player moves to a terrain tag associated with the second floor.

 

[Ellie]

Terrain tags would do except that they invoke a kind of grid, as you're imposing a finite number of layers. What do you do when someone's inbetween layers, say walking up some stairs, but in a pixel movement system?

I'd like to at some point make a game where there is a definite sense of height, where falling off a cliff into water makes sense, or even as I said, climbing up stairs, feels like climbing rather than just moving on a plane.

Could we have a situation where you're "on" a step, as part of a flat tile.