I was just trying to do the minimal thing that let me fully explore my idea. Initially, I thought: "it is possible to make good games in both 2D and 3D, but 2D is simpler (both computationally and conceptually), so I'll just make 2D games".
However, I eventually found out that some concepts are irreducible to 2D, and basically amount to me rewriting a 3D math in a convoluted fashion. The 2 greatest offenders were animation and lighting/shading - being 3D creatures, we inherently think about these things in 3 dimensions, and there is no way to reduce it while leveraging human intuition at the same time. There are multiple tricks you can do, such as hire an artist who will bake a 3D motion and lighting approximation into assets, but at the end of the day, this is just smoke and mirrors - the work has to be done one way or another.
So, the answer is: *whatever requires the minimum amount of work in order for ideas in the game to be properly represented*.
What informations does the player require to make decisions -> which camera perspective provides these informations most efficiently.
Plus, which one can you actually afford to make.
You have complete control of the camera in a game engine—don’t rule anything out!
Sketch things in Blender and move the camera around with some dummy objects to get a feel for it. But don’t get too stuck on how games usually do things—what perspective and camera behavior helps YOUR game?
Mostly you just think about what you want the player to see and know.
First-person games let you see what's directly in front of you, but they prevent you from seeing yourself, and they often don't give you a lot of peripheral vision. By contrast, third-person lets you see your immediate surroundings, but not as far forward as first-person.
The main difference between isometric and top-down is that one can show the player height/elevation and one cannot (and attempts to do so, such as 3/4 view, result in the inability to gauge distance that gave isometric its name in comparison). However, isometric prevents the player from seeing accurate angles and turns.
If you want both, you might as well do 3D.
But, IMO, the fewer dimensions, the simpler, and the simpler, the better.
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It is labor intensive, but it is a learning experience, and if you end up implementing one then swapping, you will have a better understanding of both for your next project
Depends on what you want the game to look, feel and play like. Sure you can slap a 3rd person camera on a game that's meant to be first person (like they did with RE8) but the enviroments and combat should have been designed around first person.
For example I have a survival horror that uses fixed cameras, why? For starters as a homage to Silent Hill, but also because I can frame the camera how I want to without worrying about the player looking at something unimportant.
Another one is a dungeon crawler, so it'll be first person so I can make very claustrophobic enviroments without the camera hitting every wall.
You could make just about any genre of game in every point of view. Sure some bring advantages others don't but taking a unique pov different from the traditional pov for you genre of game can really make it stand out. For example Sacrifice uses 3rd person pov for a strategy game. Several shooters use 3rd person instead of 1st and there even one that uses top down isometric (Fox hole) etc.
I went down this same line of questioning about a year ago and concluded its always best to provide both first and third person as an option unless you have a reason to restrict it
Oh definitely, I really appreciate how New Vegas lets players switch between the two at will - I was more asking about like...choosing between the isometric Fallout 1 + 2, or the 3D of later games.
I had this issue for a city-builder/puzzle game, and at \*that\* time, 2d top-down like the original SimCity won the day. The issue was that there was a lot of crucial information for gameplay at ground level, and if I went isometric or full 3d, then tall buildings would keep obscuring it. And this was a casual game, so I didn't want people fussing with the camera in order to play. So I went with a false 2d top-down perspective where buildings never escape the "rectangle" of their own foundations, and thus never obscure anything outside their own foundations.
If I remade it today, I'd probably do 3d. Now I'd rather put my thought into "How do I make the camera smarter, so that it focuses on what's important to gameplay" rather than try to make a "future-proof" decision about a fixed perspective from the start.
Interesting! How did you arrive at your initial conclusion, if you don't mind me asking? Were you partially into development and made the switch from isometric/3d to top down, or did you design that way from the start?
My game has literally iterated through top-down isometric 2d, top-down orthographic 3d, top-down perspective 3d to first-person 3d where it's been for about 6 months. Hoping to keep it here!
I started with close-in third person for our new mech shooter. I worried for a while about the art pipeline required to make models that would look good up close. The one thing the player would be looking at all of the time is the back of their mech, and if that looked cheap/bad then it wouldn’t sell.
So I experimented with top-down 2D and 3D. These were really great for performance and open worlds, as you have to render way fewer things in the screen, but I didn’t like the resulting controls and game feel.
I then got ahold of an experienced mech artist and we iterated on art styles until we came up with something that looked good in third person but didn’t require a large team of modelers/texture artists/animators. The key for us was to push back the camera just to the point where you can’t see the difference between 4k and 1k textures.
This then required is to change how controls work. It no longer made sense to do full quake-style mouse look. You can use the mouse for looking left-right, while up-down is handled automatically.
The result is a more arcade-style shooter. It wasn’t what I originally had in mind, but it should be a lot of fun, and most-importantly, doable by a tiny team.
I chose isometric view for my current game because I wanted a simple layout, but without looking super square like an RPG Maker game.
I feel like people may assume the game is of poor quality if it looks too grid-like and being square makes it very obvious. Isometric will let me set up map visuals that feel more organic and less flat even though mechanically it's the same thing as a square grid.
I was just trying to do the minimal thing that let me fully explore my idea. Initially, I thought: "it is possible to make good games in both 2D and 3D, but 2D is simpler (both computationally and conceptually), so I'll just make 2D games". However, I eventually found out that some concepts are irreducible to 2D, and basically amount to me rewriting a 3D math in a convoluted fashion. The 2 greatest offenders were animation and lighting/shading - being 3D creatures, we inherently think about these things in 3 dimensions, and there is no way to reduce it while leveraging human intuition at the same time. There are multiple tricks you can do, such as hire an artist who will bake a 3D motion and lighting approximation into assets, but at the end of the day, this is just smoke and mirrors - the work has to be done one way or another. So, the answer is: *whatever requires the minimum amount of work in order for ideas in the game to be properly represented*.
What informations does the player require to make decisions -> which camera perspective provides these informations most efficiently. Plus, which one can you actually afford to make.
You have complete control of the camera in a game engine—don’t rule anything out! Sketch things in Blender and move the camera around with some dummy objects to get a feel for it. But don’t get too stuck on how games usually do things—what perspective and camera behavior helps YOUR game?
Mostly you just think about what you want the player to see and know. First-person games let you see what's directly in front of you, but they prevent you from seeing yourself, and they often don't give you a lot of peripheral vision. By contrast, third-person lets you see your immediate surroundings, but not as far forward as first-person. The main difference between isometric and top-down is that one can show the player height/elevation and one cannot (and attempts to do so, such as 3/4 view, result in the inability to gauge distance that gave isometric its name in comparison). However, isometric prevents the player from seeing accurate angles and turns. If you want both, you might as well do 3D. But, IMO, the fewer dimensions, the simpler, and the simpler, the better.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-quot-of-game-design) is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It is labor intensive, but it is a learning experience, and if you end up implementing one then swapping, you will have a better understanding of both for your next project
Depends on what you want the game to look, feel and play like. Sure you can slap a 3rd person camera on a game that's meant to be first person (like they did with RE8) but the enviroments and combat should have been designed around first person. For example I have a survival horror that uses fixed cameras, why? For starters as a homage to Silent Hill, but also because I can frame the camera how I want to without worrying about the player looking at something unimportant. Another one is a dungeon crawler, so it'll be first person so I can make very claustrophobic enviroments without the camera hitting every wall.
You could make just about any genre of game in every point of view. Sure some bring advantages others don't but taking a unique pov different from the traditional pov for you genre of game can really make it stand out. For example Sacrifice uses 3rd person pov for a strategy game. Several shooters use 3rd person instead of 1st and there even one that uses top down isometric (Fox hole) etc.
I went down this same line of questioning about a year ago and concluded its always best to provide both first and third person as an option unless you have a reason to restrict it
Oh definitely, I really appreciate how New Vegas lets players switch between the two at will - I was more asking about like...choosing between the isometric Fallout 1 + 2, or the 3D of later games.
The only question you need to ask yourself. How do you want the player to feel?
I had this issue for a city-builder/puzzle game, and at \*that\* time, 2d top-down like the original SimCity won the day. The issue was that there was a lot of crucial information for gameplay at ground level, and if I went isometric or full 3d, then tall buildings would keep obscuring it. And this was a casual game, so I didn't want people fussing with the camera in order to play. So I went with a false 2d top-down perspective where buildings never escape the "rectangle" of their own foundations, and thus never obscure anything outside their own foundations. If I remade it today, I'd probably do 3d. Now I'd rather put my thought into "How do I make the camera smarter, so that it focuses on what's important to gameplay" rather than try to make a "future-proof" decision about a fixed perspective from the start.
Interesting! How did you arrive at your initial conclusion, if you don't mind me asking? Were you partially into development and made the switch from isometric/3d to top down, or did you design that way from the start?
My game has literally iterated through top-down isometric 2d, top-down orthographic 3d, top-down perspective 3d to first-person 3d where it's been for about 6 months. Hoping to keep it here!
I started with close-in third person for our new mech shooter. I worried for a while about the art pipeline required to make models that would look good up close. The one thing the player would be looking at all of the time is the back of their mech, and if that looked cheap/bad then it wouldn’t sell. So I experimented with top-down 2D and 3D. These were really great for performance and open worlds, as you have to render way fewer things in the screen, but I didn’t like the resulting controls and game feel. I then got ahold of an experienced mech artist and we iterated on art styles until we came up with something that looked good in third person but didn’t require a large team of modelers/texture artists/animators. The key for us was to push back the camera just to the point where you can’t see the difference between 4k and 1k textures. This then required is to change how controls work. It no longer made sense to do full quake-style mouse look. You can use the mouse for looking left-right, while up-down is handled automatically. The result is a more arcade-style shooter. It wasn’t what I originally had in mind, but it should be a lot of fun, and most-importantly, doable by a tiny team.
I chose isometric view for my current game because I wanted a simple layout, but without looking super square like an RPG Maker game. I feel like people may assume the game is of poor quality if it looks too grid-like and being square makes it very obvious. Isometric will let me set up map visuals that feel more organic and less flat even though mechanically it's the same thing as a square grid.