On 11/17/2017 at 8:36 PM, ferrous said:

Which is why most sprites in Doom tend to have so few frames of animation, because it needs to be done per facing.  IE Monster walking towards the player, monster walking away from the player, monster walking NE, SE, S, SW, etc -- except 8 cardinal directions is way too few, need at least 16 if not 32 to make look not awful as it turns.   The other issue is that highly detailed textures tend to look bad at a distance, that could be mitigated with design choices and maybe custom Mipmaps, not sure.

Adding to that, you have the costs of clothing, make up, lighting, photo shooting sessions.

If something needs to be changed or added then you need to shoot lots of pictures again.

If during that time the actor changed shape (e.g. got fatter / more fit) then you need to reshoot everything. Lost a prop? reshoot everything again.

Midway was a referent when it comes to HD live-action photo shoots (Mortal Kombat, and also their lesser known

" rel="external">Batman Forever, that style for that kind of game... let's say it didn't work out well). There's a reason they don't do that anymore. It does not scale. Mortal Kombat 3 Ultimate & MK Trilogy were already pushing it a lot with their endless palette swaps of scorpion and sub zero (+ the cyborg palette swaps).

Also actors sueing the company didn't help (it doesn't matter whether they won or not, or whether they were right; either way it was a lot of legal trouble). The most common lawsuit reasons were that the actors claimed they signed for their look-alike to appear in Mortal Kombat 1, but not in the subsequent games.

 

The TL;DR of this thread is: you can do it, but it's a terrible idea.

I reckon if you are tongue-in-cheek and down-to-earth about it, it could work. It would be perceived as somewhat artsy, so you might as well play to that and make something unique. Don't try to create a photo-realistic world, instead concentrate on using lighting to create a unified appearance, and make your textures (objects) cool and atmospheric. Just have fun with some friends getting made up like zombies against a green screen, and reference Doom by using single-frame animations and simple level geometry. I'm sure there are a bunch of neat tricks you can do with false perspective etc, but I don't think baked lighting will be necessary or a good idea. Lighting is everything, and the baked lighting may conflict hideously with the natural lighting of your photographs.

The real trick will be to make a fun and challenging game (taking into account the effect of the art style on gameplay), rather than making a pointless/crappy/boring experience which only acts as a vehicle for the experimental art style.

Re turning, look closely at Doom. The AI is not complex enough to require it. Enemies face and approach the player, and that's pretty much all a zombie is expected to do.

Look at Proteus, and of course plenty of games use billboard sprites (Don't Starve) from an isometric viewpoint.