First Post: Perspective
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My team and I are making a “shoot’em up” game in unity. I am writing this blog to try and talk about some of the issues we come across while developing the game. In our game, right now called Umibōzu, the player takes control of a fisherman out fishing in the ocean when a mysterious mist envelops the ship and weird creatures and other things start to appear. The player is tasked with escaping from the mist. One of the things my team and I struggled with was what perspective our game should be in. At first, we had decided to go with a 45° angle on the camera. However, this angle became problematic when we were trying out the movement system. We wanted the player to be able to steer the boat in any direction they wanted, this does not work well with the 45° angle since having a rotating sprite would look wrong and having a sprite for each direction available for the player is simply not reasonable. A top down perspective however, works perfectly well with a rotating sprite, so we decided to go with that. This did mean that we would lose most of the work we had put in for the 45° perspective but we felt that having the game playable was more important. After having worked on the top down perspective for a week though, we realised that we thought it looked horrible. After some debating we ended up returning to the 45° perspective anyways. This time we decided that the visual presentation of the game was more important than a arbitrary movement system, so we changed the movement to an eight-directional system where the player instantly moves in the direction they are currently pressing the movement keys in and the sprite switches to the respective sprite in that direction.
This is the top down version of the boat. It rotates when the player changes direction.
These are the prototype sprites for the new movement system. The boat switches between them based on what direction the player is moving in.  |
