2d vs 2.5d vs 3d adventure from a tech POV

FredFive

Hi all, new guy to AC and the forum.

I am currently in the research phase of creating my first adventure. 

What I've been wondering is wether a 2D, 2.5D or a 3D adventure is more manageable from a rookies POV. I guess when starting out a on a project one should consider ones abilities. My 2D drawing skills are pretty solid, as I have been doing backgrounds and concept art for a couple of years now. 

This definitely pulls me towards a classic adventure style like Broken Sword 2. But I haven't been doing very much handdrawn animation, and I had the thought of doing a 2.5D adventure with a MakeHuman character. 

Now a full 3D adventure is crossing my mind as I want to explore the possibilities of Oculus Rift in the future, but I'm worried that a lot of the old school feeling and warmth from the hand drawings will be lost to bad 3d models (not a very skilled 3d artist yet)

What are your feelings and experience with the 3 different D's ? Which do you like better, not only to play, but also working with in AC?

Happy to be on the forum and hoping to post some concepts of my upcoming (test)game soon

-Fred

ChrisIceBox

I'll leave the floor open to people who actually use Adventure Creator to actually create adventures , but I will say that the workflows are designed to be as similar as they can be, and generally share the same systems.  Transferring from one to the other isn't so drastic as you might imagine.

hedgefield

Hey Fred,

I kinda feel the same way about this, my strength is 2D but I'd love to make a 3D game one day. But from experience I would say that making a 2D game is roughly the easiest route to take, especially if you don't know much about 3D, I've seen all kinds of weird stuff happen with that. 2D is nice and manageable and easy to adjust, and animating isn't that hard, especially in Unity now. If you just cut up your characters into seperate limbs you can have something good-looking pretty quickly.

And I guess partly it depends on what kind of game you want to make. Do you have any ideas for what you want to do with your first game?

FredFive

Hi guys and thanks for the replies.

The story in short:

You play a male character in his late 30's. The setting will be on a sail boat in the Pacific Ocean. When he is surprised by a storm, he finds himself marooned on his vessel, which is no longer shipshape. He is on his own, and needs to find a way to return home.

The puzzles will be inventory based, and the ones in the early stages, involves crafting fishing gear, crafting a makeshift rain collector (thinking of having some survival elements), repair of scuba gear (which will be needed for underwater repairs of the rudder).

The reason for choosing a boat as a setting, is primarily due to the limited rooms and characters I'll need to create (It seems manageable within a certain timeframe). And a fascination with the ocean and sailboats in general.

If all goes well with the creation of the game, I'm thinking he'll down the line will make it to shore somewhere, and further elements of survival could be brought in play.  

Also thinking he'll maybe have a dog which could be controllable in some parts of the game

As in a lot of adventures, the setting is a character in itself. And I have a hard time figuring out whether it is possible to create a convincing ocean, waves, foam, crests and so on. I'm felling it's going to be crucial to the immersion. Therefore I'm thinking the ocean could be a 3d layer on top of the 2d background art.

hedgefield

That sounds like a super rad game, I can picture it in my mind, awesome! I love the idea of a boat, there are way too few games on boats. And good choice on the limited scope, that's super important if you want to get a project like this off the ground.

Water can be tricky, it's always hard to animate in 2D, so yeah I would probably go the Unity 3D Ocean way, where you just drop a plane in and mess with the parameters to simulate the different conditions. There are a ton of water prefabs on the asset store. We did it the same way in our 2(.5)D game back when there was no 2D support yet, and it looked great. You could also look at how Rayman Legends does it, that water looks gorgeous there, or Under The Ocean has 2D water bits in it too. The Uncanny Fish Hunt had a great looking solution too

FredFive

Thanks for the ideas

I like the Rayman water -looks beatiful! Fish Hunt has a totally different vibe in regards to what I am looking for. But never the less, it looks good.

Creating a calm ocean realtime in-game seems to be manageable, but if I want stormy seas in a section of the game I'm afraid that's going to be a bit harder to achieve. Maybe it needs to be limited to cut scenes. 

What I'm thinking is doing a 3d render of an ocean like Red Thread did with The Longest Journey if I'm going with illustrated realism, or perhaps do a 3d render with handdrawn textures, like in the intro of Monkey 3.

You can see on deviantart via this link, how my graphic style looks like, if your interested

dxmachina

Hi Fred,

This is a really interesting topic to bring up. I'm not sure I can be of any help in answering the questions for you, but I've taken a bit of the same journey.

First, let me echo what Chris mentioned about the relative ease with which you can go back and forth between different systems. It still involves some work, of course... but it's doable enough that it might be worth a test. That's what I ended up doing.

I honestly love 2D art, and that is one of the big appeals of the genre. It's also (from my non-artist perspective) much more affordable and easy to find a particular style without having to get into custom shader programming, fancy lighting, etc. 2D also runs a lot easier across platforms.

On the other hand, once I tried building an identical 3D version of one of my locations it was hard not to love the camera freedom. You feel a bit like a film director and can really articulate your scenes with some subtle camera work. I also still do find the navigation and obstacle setup to work a little easier over the 2D mode.

My main issue with 3D is really the cost of assets and higher difficulty in finding the right style. If I were a great 3D artist (or I was going for a more-cartoony style) I think the direction would be clearer to me. But I can do a lot more with lovely 2D given my limitations.

So, what I'm attempting to do (not particularly well yet) is employ some matte and camera projection techniques to add a little extra "give" to my 2D scenes (plus some particle effects and simple lighting). Ask me again in a few weeks and I may have given up, but I'm making some progress!

For characters, I've ended up using 3D so far... primarily because there are really nice inexpensive animation options available now (that can be broadly applied with Mechanim). So far I'm still in stock-character mode, and my feeling about this may change as I move forward.

FredFive

Hey dxmachina,

I totally get what you're saying. We agree on this matter as far as I can tell. 

The camera freedom your referring to when going 3D is a really nice option to have, when trying to accomplish a cinematic feeling. But then again, as you're mentioning, the beautiful 2D art is really what makes the adventure genre so unique, personal and memorable. 

On the top of my head, the full 3d adventure path has been tried (and in my humble opinion, failed to some degree), 3D games like Broken Sword: Sleeping Dragon, Monkey Island 4 and others, are pretty much forgotten. I don't know if it is due to technical limitations of the time, but recent adventures hasn't been trying to go down the 3D road. The games I remember and love are all 2D or 2.5D. 

First of all I want to create games and the experience (thanks to Chris for the possibility to do this now!). I love to draw, and not especially fond of the tech side that follows along the full 3D path. But it does give you some really nice possibilities. And I am willing to learn.

Could you elaborate on your matte and camera projection techniques? Are you talking about 3d layers?

-And if you have any work you are willing to share I would love to see it

dxmachina

I'm afraid I don't have anything very good to show with the projection technique yet. I'm aware of it only because I've played around a bit with it with my photography. The video that first blew my mind open about the technique:


and then...



My hypothesis was that a 2D handpainted workflow could even simplify this process (since you can potentially avoid a lot of trial and error and photoshop extraction/healing). But easier said than done! In truth, I may end up reverting to simple 2D if the time/expense is too high, because I'd rather make a game than a tech demo. But...

Recently discovered a pretty high profile adventure is now using this technique. Take a look here:

The end result is really quite stunning, I think.

hedgefield

Wow that Whispered World 2 gameplay looks great.

We used the same technique in the game I mentioned before, where someone builds a simple 3D mesh of how the room probably looks in 3D, then from the camera's perspective projects the image over it. If you rotate the camera too far it looks like garbage, but for the most part it's a cool way to do it, not super difficult, although I wouldn't prefer doing it that way myself, but then I'm bad at 3D

So good luck dx I'm curious to see what you do with it!

FredFive

Wow... just wow! Those are some pretty cool videos, really amazing what's been achieved from photos and drawings. This is really something I would love to see implemented in more adventures (and in mine as well )

I have done something similar with my drawings for an intro to a game, though a bit more basic, in After Effects working with 3d layers, but this is of course rendered and not in-game. I think I'll check the internet if there's any tutorials for doing this. Maybe you know of some?

By seeing the Silence gameplay, I can't quite grasp how they accomplish this 3d look. As far I can tell, it's both 2d drawings beeing projected on 3d planes, and some actual 3d objects?

FredFive

Hedgefield,

So you actually use the camera in the 3d application to project a 2d drawing on the mesh? Or is it different lights with projector maps, projecting on to different parts of the 3d scene?

hedgefield

Yeah probably, that's how Lost Horizon did it too I think.

You can take the same idea you're using in After Effects and apply it to gameobjects in Unity ofcourse. If you construct the environment by arranging textured planes in 3D space and leave everything else set as 2D you can probably do some fancy zooms and pans too.

[update] Yeah that's how it we did it. It was a bit complicated and sadly I cannot show you a screenshot since I don't have access to the project files anymore, but that was the basic idea, project the psd of the room art onto the basic mesh. This ofcourse means you get the 'kinect effect' where everything on the sides and back gets warped and strechted, so you would probably get better results using multiple projections or textures.

FredFive

Hm, this could a technique worth pursuing or at least testing. -Both keeping the 2d feeling and get a bit of camera freedom. But maybe it's a bit much for an AC and Unity newcomer to grasp for the first game. 

dxmachina

Breaking your image into separate image planes that are offset in depth (and doing some simple parallax -with the script included with AC) is definitely a pretty easy way to get a little motion in 2D. Particle effects and camera zooms/pans are also doable (within reason). But AFAIK, you are then working in the older AC 2D mode - vs the top-down view that simplifies pathfinding and obstacle creation.

The technique in the videos above uses camera projections on to 3D meshes to allow for some additional flexibility of movement and realism.

In my tests, the former is dead simple to do but doesn't yield results as striking as the latter. But I'm pretty new to this myself, so take it for what it's worth. But one thing I can tell you about parallax with painted backgrounds is that less seems to be more! Big parallax differences just make everything feel cut-out. Subtle changes can feel like natural depth.

Still experimenting. Will let everyone know if I come up with anything brilliant (or more likely - decent).

FredFive

Cool, keep me posted on this matter

I think for a start, I will get a grip on how to create a simple 2d adventure experience, and focus on getting my AC skills up.  Then perhaps work in the 3d camera projection in the cut scenes.

And when you say less is more, I agree. I tried to keep it simple in my 2d game intro. Just a little movement to create the illusion of 3d space. I'll try and upload it to youtube, if anyone wants to check it out

EDIT: Here's the intro I've created for a game project at school. Did the graphics, compositing, and music. This is kind of the look and style I'm going for with my adventure