Developing New Game - Is Isometric view too confusing for modern gamers?

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24 comments, last by kingdomslayer 5 years, 7 months ago

With cliffs this steep, how do the player see tiles/stuff behind a steep cliff?

In front of it works fine of course, but not behind...

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Yeah good point Suliman, I've actually built a system into the renderer so that the user can rotate the view of the world by 90 or 180 degrees to see things around cliffs.

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

I think a visible grid would help, particularly to solve ambiguities between height variations and horizontal displacements, count horizontal distances, count height differences (this tile is N layers above the adjacent tile). Seamless isometric graphics work well with simple natural shapes and ramps, like in Starcraft, not with stylized steps.

Alternatively, a nicer map structure would be legible without needing outlines; I don't think a regular structure (e.g. Q*bert) could be an option given the current screenshots, but maybe you can decide that the game is set on a slope (given two tiles if x1>x2 or y1>y2 then z1>=z2) to prevent occlusion and avoid having to turn the viewpoint.

Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru

Hi LorenzoGatti, adding a grid would improve visibility but make the graphics kinda ugly. Not sure if its worth it?

I've taken some extra suggestions that some people have given and integrated the mouse position into the UI.

Some updated screenshots:

 

unknown.png

unknown2.png

Here's the new cursor in action:

 

unknown3.png

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

I think that gamers can get used to the isometric view if they played long enough, a lot of games are like this too but it's still rarely seen in AA titles

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