After gathering some reference images from games that I remembered liking the perspective while I was playing, and hacking on them to figure out where their vanishing points were, these are the perspective options I am considering for a 2D RPGsim: Larger picture here. As you can hopefully see, these options vary in how strongly angled the perspective is, which corresponds to how low or high the vanishing point is - in some it is in the upper part of the screen, in others two or three screens off the top of what is actually shown in the game. In the Harvest Moon: Magical Melody examples (far left) no sky is visible at all, while at the other extreme the sky takes up almost half the screen, or in several cases whether the sky is visible or not depends on the vertical scrolling of the screen. So basically, do you all know of any reasons why one of these options would be significantly better or worse than another?

It depends on what the focus of the game is. Harvest Moon is all about the management of ground tiles, so the viewpoint is showing the local grid around the player. However if you need to see far into the distance, you'll neeed to show the horizon line.

It also depends a bit on the technology you're using to make the game. All those views save the one of the far right (which looks like a Lost Garden tileset) are 3D graphics, although some are showing 2D gameplay. If you're using a 2D tile set then you're limited in the views that will look good; the typical isometric viewpoint would be better for a management game involving manipulating tiles.

The kind of isometric where the tiles look like diamonds rather than squares is actually a pain in the butt for any kind of sim gameplay - HM: Back to Nature had that perspective and it resulted in a lot more player errors with aiming/targeting.

Not sure what you mean by 3D graphics - the 3rd pic is from Woodruff and the Schnibble, a game made before 3D existed, I believe it was a DOS game. And the second to last pic is entirely hand drawn. But you're correct about HM: Magical Melody and the fourth shot which is actually from FF8, those were 3D games. But they are fixed viewpoint 3D games, which means it would be relatively easy to just convert all the models to sprites.

I'm not sure how I overlooked commenting on that one, as it's clearly 2D. Chalk that up to typing in a rush.

I can't really see what's going on in that Woodruff game, but it seems like it's one of those hand painted 2D games. Are you making a tile based game or planning on something with complete background scenes? If it's the latter, you can do whatever perspective you like, but in the former there's some practical considerations from using tiles and the engine involved.

3D graphic technology is actually better for you in terms of giving you more options with perspective. You can do pretty much anything if your art is all 3D. However if you've got 2D sprites in there it starts putting in more restrictions on what works visually. You can hack together a 2D/3D hybrid if your ground plane is perfectly flat, and just do a "floor" made of 2D sprite tiles, but you'll need to be careful if you want to also put 2D billboard sprites.

You can also go with the SNES style perspective of using square tiles or slightly oblong tiles to give a sense of perspective instead of the diamond shaped isometric tiles. Or there's the Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past style that breaks the rules of perspective in order to show more detail of the surroundings, like showing the surface of all four dungeon walls in a top down view.

WatS is indeed a hand-painted (or pixel-arted) game. Since I'm looking at using flash I'm thinking in terms of layers: a hand-painted backdrop, then tiles overlaid on that wherever the ground is tilled, the darkness of them showing how much they have been watered, then sprites of buildings, fence posts, trees, rocks, animals, people, etc. And the layering could be mathematically determined according to where the base of the sprite is, whichever one has the base lower on the screen would be in a higher level. And one of those invisible path layers that determines where things are and aren't allowed to walk. As with I'll my designs, I'm thinking romance in there somewhere, which is why I don't want to use a view more overhead than these, because that's bad for showing facial expressions and making characters look attractive. Besides the fact that I just don't personally like overhead perspectives, lol.

This is kind of a make-it-up-as-I-go-along experiment, so I guess subconsciously I am wanting to leave room for implementing platformer, arcade beat-em-up, or adventure/puzzle elements later if I want to.

If it's Flash, then I'd recommend throwing together a few quick prototypes to see if the ideas work before you put too much effort into the sprite work. It wouldn't be that hard to do make a few throw-away prototypes of different views and see which has the best appeal.

As for showing character expression, if you're going with dialog boxes you can always add portraits to them, which would mean you can get away with any viewpoint or scale. Plus I like talking heads to show emotion [smile]

True, prototypes are great, I was just hoping to cross some of these off the list first so I have fewer alternatives to prototype. And the more I look at the FF8 one the more it sucks so I am going to cross that one off.

Erk, I think I just realized what you meant by the 3D part though. I realized I have no idea how HM: Magical Melody maintains that angled perspective while having lots of vertical and horizontal scrolling. That would require stretching the background and tiles differently according to where the camera focus was, and redrawing it as the camera moves? That seems like serious math, and the stretching might make it look crappy. Although I remember WatS having both vertical and horizontal scrolling, and FF7 which had 3D sprites on hand-painted backgrounds, also had plenty of scrolling. Have to research how they did it... Parallaxing, but what else?

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Erk, I think I just realized what you meant by the 3D part though. I realized I have no idea how HM: Magical Melody maintains that angled perspective while having lots of vertical and horizontal scrolling. That would require stretching the background and tiles differently according to where the camera focus was, and redrawing it as the camera moves? That seems like serious math, and the stretching might make it look crappy. Although I remember WatS having both vertical and horizontal scrolling, and FF7 which had 3D sprites on hand-painted backgrounds, also had plenty of scrolling. Have to research how they did it... Parallaxing, but what else?

The maths isn't that hard - it's the same projective geometry used for 3D games, so there's plenty of resources out there. The stretching however is the problem I can foresee. You don't get that problem with a non-perspective tile based view like a 2D square tile map or an isometric view. It could look like those fake 3D games from the early nineties.

If you plan on hand-painting all the backgrounds like in old adventure games or RPGs like Baldur's Gate (and I guess FF7 - I've only played the demo), I think they did that by having an invisible geometry map of the scene to define where the characters could move and how to scale. Possibly they also used layers for things in the foreground - I guess that'd depend on the game. I can only dimly remember a few inside peeks at the design behind King's Quest IV.

However hand-painting the background might make it difficult to do different tiles for a management game (I'm assuming this is your farming sim idea?). You might need to hybridise background techniques with tiles for the garden.