So, I've decided to go 2.5 d on my next project. This is just fooling around. My plan is to use gridmaps for the environment, and 3d characters in blender that are in reduced resolution. Don't pay any attention to the skeleton and blob head. I'll redo everything in blender. This is just throwing something down as an experiment.

Neat! Looking forward to seeing more.

Is your plan to export the models from blender or render out the lowres stills as spritesheets?

    retroshark I'm going to use spritesheets because I like having the freestyle lines on the characters. Plus I just like the look for some reason of the 2d and 3d mixed. The buildings and terrain will be 3d with low res textures.

      Will it be isometric?
      If you are going for this low res 3d style, games like donkey country and early pc games could be great references.

        SuperDoomKing It's going to be 3d but basically look like a 2d isometric but not go angular, just forward and right and left. Yeah, I'm trying to find games for a reference like that. The battles is the hard part. I want to do turn based with strategy.

            fire7side
            Have you thought about using custom resources for the battles and stats.
            Custom resources and some exports will allow you to configure everything nicely.

                SuperDoomKing Yeah, that would be the way to go. I'll have to study up on that. I've only used them kind of in a test inventory before.

                  I tried gridmap with 3D tile once, but the brush/palette in godot 4 is not very user friendly and it is a pita to edit painted tiles, when combined with tilemap it becomes a major mayhem, so I gave up. -.-

                    MagickPanda Yeah, I've been experimenting with it in godot 3.5 and it is still pretty limited. I don't think I would want to use it with tilemap. The nice thing is you can still use normal 3d placement for some objects and even use multiple gridmaps with different size objects. This is a simple experiment with it.

                        fire7side I think using a quad mesh3d with viewport texture rendered by tilemap2d is a decent solution for pure flat tiled 3d terrain ground, but you still have to add 3d object blocks manually, and viewport texture has a bug randomly turning blank/purple/garbled texture in editor, though it has no impact in game.

                            4 days later

                            I designed the battle scene. It looks 2d because I used the orthographic camera to keep the grid size the same. I just finished the skeletons in blender. Just the idle so far.

                            11 days later

                            Characters are taking turns walking with astar 2d. I don't have obstacle avoidance but that's nothing. Next is to actually have choices hooked up. World's slowest developer.

                            9 days later