So I've gotten a small, if incomplete team together for game making,(still need to find a good game artist) and we've gotten to planing out a game now, Right now we're trying to figure out weather we should do a 2D game engine with 3D things in it, or just full 3d, ether way the game will be simple. the main character will fly, much like this, with controls for flying up or down as well as left right etc. The self set time to complete is a year, so we're trying to figure out the best design for the game. A little help would be appreciated, thank you.

I'm not the best at explaining myself by the way, so feel free to ask if I sound confusing or off.

2D game engine with 3D things in it

If you have no experiences in managing a team or making a game I would sugguest to keep the feature list as small as possible (features will creep in all the time), therefore my vote for 2d with some 3d elements.

2D game engine with 3D things in it

This is rather confusing to me :/ Did you meant that the game logic/rules will be 2D (i.e. cannot got up and down while flying) but the graphical representation of the game state would be done with 3D graphics?

Cannot agree more with Ashaman73 about feature creep. One year seems a bit long maybe you can set yourself shorter intermediate goals like interactive demo in 3 months, pre-alpha in 6, etc..

2D

(there are some tricks and special cases where 3D game can be made much easier & faster than 2D but that's a rare thing and require a specific game design (like Minecraft with non existant tiny textures that looks like these were made in Paint and all models being boxes )).

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2D game engine with 3D things in it

Cannot agree more with Ashaman73 about feature creep. One year seems a bit long maybe you can set yourself shorter intermediate goals like interactive demo in 3 months, pre-alpha in 6, etc..
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You either never worked in a team before, or you had a very consistent designer that knew what he wanted and didn't want to add anything on top what you already had.

Anyway. I guess it also depends on what you exactly want to achieve, with what tools, mechanics and all the micmac that comes when making a game. Does your programmer know anything about game programming (I'm assuming not, else you wouldn't ask it here).

Creating the effect of going in depth in a 2D engine might be a problem if you don't know how, in that regard perhaps a 3D engine would be better. But if you want to keep things simple, a 2D engine would probably do the trick.

My head programmer has experience with games, but only with 2d games, he's never worked with 3d stuff, future games will likely be full 3d, so I'm almost considering just a real simple 3d game to give us a chance to practice, if that makes sense, another thing is we only have one 2d artist, and she specializes in paintings rather then pixel art, personally wouldn't mind some much more experienced help, but not easy to find.

future games will likely be full 3d

What for? Do you have million dollars budget? Do you want to compete with AAA titles made by companies that have hundreds of staff? What's the point mastering a technology for which you can't afford the art assets anyway?

I don't want to start a discussion on this, there are plenty of exceptions and tricks to make all this irrelevant, but what I meant is you are thinking like an owner of a big dev studio, not like an entry level indie which you seem to be according to resources at your disposal.


You DON'T need to make 3D games to make a decent living of games, you are NOT forced to use high level technologies to make awesome games (Dwarf Fortress). You are not forced to mimick gigantic expensive studios (which are going bankrupt on regular basis) to break into gaming industry.

<p>Tha

Thank you, but I don't plan to do anything more in size to something like those dinky little flash games, according toa good friend(Who is usually to busy to help.) ether way I need a 3d engine for what I want, so it'll likely just be 3d anyway.

I can't make a judgment without any information on what you actually do in the game. The video doesn't really give me enough to go by.

I think you should decide on 2D or 3D based on what you think it adds to the gameplay. Do you need/want that 3rd dimension?