Problem with perspective

What: This week I’ve been continuing working on the tiles for the walls and floors in our game. I have also been working on other elements in the game such as posters and some furniture.

Since our game will be a stealth game we have decided to have a top-down perspective. But in order to get more feeling to the setting we decided on this sort of fake-isometric perspective for the walls, this will allow us to put posters and stuff on the walls and make different rooms different colours.

When we started thinking about perspective we decided that the walls should be in this fake isometric perspective and the furniture and the character should still be top-down. We knew this would clash a bit but after some consideration we decided to do it anyways. We thought this would be the best way to make the environment interesting but at the same time good for stealth gameplay.

In the beginning of this week I felt that this kind of perspective worked really well. It looked good when I tested building rooms and stuff in Tiled (mapeditor.org). But now at the end of the week, when I’ve started with furniture… I don’t know any more.

As I see it we have three options… One of them very painful as it will mean that the work I’ve done will be for nothing (except maybe a healthy lesson).

Option One: Going through with our original plan. Walls will be fake-isometric, furniture and characters will be top-down. See picture 1.

Option Two: Make furniture fake-isometric as well. This is the option I think is the best, doing furniture this way will make it more interesting and it will be easier to know what things are. I don’t think we will have to change the perspective on characters because I think they look pretty good even if they are top-down in a non-top-down world. See picture 2.

Option Three: This option is the one I think is least likely to happen. It would be to stick with the fake-isometric perspective and change all the Characters that we have already into the same perspective. This would look the best but it would add a whole lot of work to the artists that make the character animations. And since we’re on a tight schedule I don’t think it is possible.

Option Four: The easiest way to solve the perspective problem would be to just do all the walls top-down… just thick lines. If we did that we would have a perspective that made sense but we would miss the opportunity to have things like posters and colours that would make the environment more alive.

Tomorrow I will address these matters on our group meeting so that we can come to a conclusion that will make our game the best it can be.

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