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
Comments
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.
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.
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).