Dear all, I currently scratch my head about if it would be better to create an isometric style game in 2d or better in 3d for mobile devices. What do you think would be the best options for that and why? Both have pro and cons. Thanks!
this is a very big "it depends" answer. It depends on your art skills/teams art skills a lot. It also depends on what type of game you are making. It is a wide genre.
We are currently working on a fixed perspective game (camera is stuck at 45 degrees). We preprocess the terrain as sprites then we use 3D models for all the characters. It really does depend on many factors. For example: You want to do 3D when You have a lot of different art resources that would take up huge quantities of space because of minor differences in sprites or you have characters that require a number of animations etc So our new game has characters and at first we used sprites but found (as the animation list grew) that each character used significant storage for all the directions (we did 8 per guy). Shifting to 3D let us recycle animations for each model - a massive saving and the animations looked smoother and blended better. What engine (if any) are you using? That should be a major factor. Anyway, it really depends on your needs and what tech you use. Since its isometric and the perspective is forced, you can get away cheaply for buildings and stuff (generally) using 2D but (like I gave an example of) characters can be difficult.
Thanks guys for your thoughts! Regarding the engine it would be either Monkey (2d) or Unity (3d). The game will play in space, where you have some kind of a station which you enhance and build stuff on platforms. You will have ships to attack even though not masses of them. Animations are a very good point. I have a talented 3d modeller so doing everything in 3d might be much easier. Cheers!
if you have a 3d modeller and then it would make sense to go 3D, rather than 3D and made 2D sprites. There are lots of benefits in terms of animations rather than new sprite sheets.
