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Camera Angles For Roguelike-likes: Discuss. Nothing new this time, save that the magical technology of alpha testing is sort-of working. Hence ugly water-lily pads in the picture. I cannot for the life of me get them to render shadows properly, to the point where I'm wondering if my hardware just doesn't do alpha testing when rendering to f32 render targets. Regardless, I quite liked this shot and it fits what I've been thinking.

I spent a few hours this weekend tweaking and adding stuff, and one of the conclusions I'm coming to is that the top-down view so endemic to roguelikes just doesn't show off a lot of the sparkly shininess. That, and it is really hard to design meshes for. Most things look like rocks from that angle, and I don't have the talent to avoid this.

As I've also been blowing the dead spiders off the gameplay code, I figure it might be worth investigating a few options. Third-person RL could work, if changing view direction is free or low-cost compared to moving (the latter could make for a very interesting game, I feel, if the same restricted field of view is applied to enemies).

First person solves a few problems with cameras hitting walls, but I don't think it'd work very well with movement restricted to tiles.

An angled view in line with ye olde isometric games or, say, Torchlight's camera can also work well. Need a good solution for game objects being behind walls though, especially monsters.

Of these, third-person seems like it could be the most interesting from a gameplay point of view, and the last option feels like a safe fallback if that can't be made to work. So, I shall be trying these things out!
at 01:03 Labels: camera, roguelike, viewpoint, water 
As a quick fix for the wall problem, you could have angled view normally and have a keypress switch to a top-down view.

You've got some nice graphics, btw. Keep it up!

4 December 2010 at 15:43 Snut said...

Hmm, view toggling is certainly an idea. I fear that one or the other would prove optimal, however, and I'd need to make sure the game looks nice from that view to the detriment of the other. Something to bear in mind though, cheers!

And thanks for the kind words. If only game mechanics were as easy as making things sparkle.

6 December 2010 at 10:39 
looks like what that cave might look like after eating a few of those mushrooms. interesting stuff, keep up the good work. and consider throwing the code up on github or w/e

8 February 2011 at 05:44