isometric game making?

[Jon B]

Hey guys,

Can you help me find resourses, tutorials and links about building isometric games in flash?

If any of you have completed something of this nature then I would appreciate any personal advice you have etc.

Thanks,

Jon

[farafiro]

http://www.flashjava.com/tutorials/i...ective%20games

[dzy2566]

Flash MX Game Design Demystified is a great book for that. You can check it out at Amazon here.

[momentus]

That book dzy2566 mentioned is great. I can't recommend it enough. Also check out http://oos.moxiecode.com/

My best advice would be to build a top-down tile based game first. There are plenty of tutorials in the link above. Get yourself familiar with arrays because it's the key to making great iso-games (in fact sidescrollers like Mario are tile-based also).

Once you've played around with that a little and feel confident, then move onto building an isometric game. The math gets a lot more complicated here, but everything you learnt from building a top-down tile based game will prove indispensible as the concepts are all the same. You gotta walk before you learn to run, right?

And buy that book too.

momentus

[xxlm]

Yeah, Flash MX Game Design Demystified is a great book...
And yes http://oos.moxiecode.com/ is great too... Seems taht we all have the same ressource...

BTW, a friend and I are working on a rpg game...
we're actually doing the engine (mean scrolling map, moving char and so on) in OOP. When done I will post it on as.org... I hope it will be soon...LOL

[momentus]

I'd love to see that. I worked on an iso environment last summer for a few weeks but ran into some performance issues with scrolling because the client wanted an 800*600 deliverable. Needless to say, Flash chocked pretty hard in this environment. We ended up going the room-by-room technique, but the original code was never very optimized anyways. If you have any techinques for achieving scrolling iso environments that run at a decent frame rate I'd be very interesting to hear how you approached it.

momentus

[xxlm]

OK ...
As soon it is ok...

[Ricod]

Well, let's join in on this one. I wanted to do this Isometric tactical game, like tactics Ogre / Final Fantasy Tactics for a while. Haven't started , but since I have a holiday now ... now would be a good moment to start ^^

So, xxlm, did you test graphics yet ? Would it be better to make the tiles in isometric view already ? Or isn't it much harder to do it squarish, and then rotate in flash ? (topdown is easier to make the tiles .. well, tilable after all)

[xxlm]

Actually I'm working on a top view, not isometric...

So i can't really answering. But in my oppinion, I think it's easier to made isometric graph and then when defining your tile set the free space (i mean the area where you char can walk on), using sub array...

But really I dunno... It's just a VISION ..

CU

[momentus]

Ricod,

Hmm.... I suppose one could draw the tiles, the rotate them, then reduce the _yscale to half... but this would only work for ground tiles. I don't know how you would approach something like a wall which has height. Probably lots of math or something....

xxlm - In my opinion, you're absolutely right about using sub-arrays in your map array. I remember reading somewhere someone recommended using an array with three variables for each tile - one var for the graphic sprite, one var for the behaviour (walkable, non-walkable, explodable, etc), and a third var for pickups and objects.

Speaking of making sprites though, I had a thought and maybe someone can offer some insight. I haven't worked at all with any 3-D programs - does anyone know if any 3D progs can render out things in isometric perspective? It's a little different than true 3D because the vertical lines are always parallel - they have no vanishing point. Any thoughts anyone?

momentus