Basically, I have started design on a 3-D puzzle game based off of Puyo Puyo. Of course, since it is 3-D, there are many issues to consider. I've already considered some issues, such as visibility and accurate depth perception, and have thought of some possible solutions. Maybe you all can be of some help, maybe stating possible concerns and/or solutions that could possibly be incorporated to the final design. Any takers? [edited by - jman2050 on September 17, 2003 6:46:04 PM]

I think it will be difficult to avoid visibility problems. One way is to play with transparency of layers but I''m sure you already thought about that. You could also highlight the neighbours surrounding the place where the piece will fall, with a gradient according to the depth of these neighbours. It depends if you see the puyos from above, you could play with perspective + fog to increase the depth feeling.

The only thing I''m sure, is that I would use marching-cubes to tesselate the metaballs and would code it in pseudo 3D only (camera in front of the puyos, like the 2D game).

Well, the perspective would sort of be like a behind-the-back view (not quite overhead but close). One thing I was thinking of was to show the play area and to the side, show a small grid that shows the uppermost puyos in each column, with different gradients to show how high they are. However, this would mean players would have to divide their attention between two things at once. Whether this is enough of a problem to warrant throwing it out could only be determined by playtesting...

I''m pretty good at processing complex input rapidly, so take my suggestions with a pinch of salt, but my first thought would be to have two orthogonal vertical cross sections on screen so that you display the closest layer to the camera transparently and the highlighted layer behind that solidly.

At the same time, the main view is from above the play area with two pairs of parallel lines (centered on the active piece or fixed point of active piece if it''s horizontal) to show which slices are being highlighted in the cross sections. Something like:

ooo|o|o
ooo|o|o
-------
ooo|o|o
-------
ooo|o|o

That way, the player has access to complete information if he has time to think about it (and scan the piece across) and can see at a glance the most pertinent information (what his desperation move is going to land on)