Isometric possibility?

DavidWolf

Hey guys.
I did the 2D/3D tutorials, but I want to make a Dungeon Keeper-esque city builder game which would have an isometric viewpoint. I was wondering if there was a resource out there for making isometric games, or if it's more of a modified camera function.

Thanks.

JusTiCe8

Take a look at official demos, there is one isometric which could help you starting your project.
(some PR not yet merged can also be helpful like this one)

DavidWolf

JusTiCe8

Thank you for your reply!

I looked through the functioning 2D isometric and it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I was considering 3D most of all, with a camera that would rotate at certain isometric angles and zoom in and out. Unfortunately, the 2D demo isn't camera based, but relies on the tiles being laid to provide a forced perspective. Is there a 3D-specific camera tutorial that's better suited?

JusTiCe8

You're welcome.

You need to be more specific when asking something if you want a relevant answer, I found this little project made for Godot 4, for the camera, also you may take inspiration from the isometric view mode in editor, I guess settings value for the camera are located somewhere in the source code.

Isometric view was not designed to be made in actual 3D AFAIK, maybe some game designers found this funny despite being a bit technically non-sense as isometric game were designed to give a 3D look faked in 2D. But who knows ? As long as someone have fun with this, why not ?

Lethn

JusTiCe8 I don't understand where you got this opinion from? Even if what you claim might be true initially about isometric, it's an extremely common camera setup and art style now.

synthnostate

JusTiCe8 Isometric view was not designed to be made in actual 3D AFAIK, maybe some game designers found this funny despite being a bit technically non-sense as isometric game were designed to give a 3D look faked in 2D. But who knows ? As long as someone have fun with this, why not ?

I've done both (in custom engines). 2D isometric has a charming look but the artwork is a ton of work unless you 3D-render it. It's easier to emulate that look in true 3D, and you can take some shortcuts, you don't need anything fancy like PBR textures; diffuse+AO+lightmaps would look great. A nice compromise is 3D characters on hand-drawn 2D backgrounds with a fixed camera angle and orthographic projection (no perspective). Temple of Elemental Evil might have been the first game to do that, at least 20 years ago. Godot supports all of these.

Lethn

The way I did this was tilt the camera down -50 degrees at start on the appropriate axis but for me it was X, I also rotated the objects themselves -30 on the Y axis, tweaking the objects might not even be necessary though, may rethink that.

For movement in my projects I use a heavily modified version of this tutorial, if you want a camera that follows the player, I recommend taking the camera rotation code from this tutorial and then having the camera copy the player position.

Be sure to set the tilt of your camera in the _start process, otherwise it will lead to gimbal lock issues. I would definitely encourage you to do a 3D setup for isometric because even though the setup is initially difficult and you've got maths to learn with selection boxes etc. I found that working with TileMaps was agony for things like building placement.

Please note, the rotation maths does depend on how you've set your assets up, you may need to do some tweaking to get the look you want, but that's all down to time and patience, this is just a general guide on what I did for my stuff. I'm a fan of isometric games myself so I thought I'd chime in with some detail.