Hello guys.
So my game is technically a 3D game when it comes to the logic, I use a 3D physics engine to handle movement, collisions, etc. But it is limited in some ways, like there is no rotation, bodies can only move in 4 directions (north, west, south, east) and the Y axis is completly ignored.
That’s it, it is basically a top down 2D game with 2D sprites but internally I still use some 3D components because dealing with 2D physics engines it’s too much for me.
Now There’s something I really don’t like about the result, and it is the player’s movement. Allowing the characters to move only on 4 directions sems to work fine for NPCs and objects, but it doesn’t feel right for the player, specially when I have action-adventure mechanics.
I’ve seen some games like Rune Factory in which they place 3D models for the characters and other entities, so yhey can allow the player to move freely using the gamepad’s stick, and I’d like to know if someone could answer some questions about this topic.
In general, how is this called? Is there a way to caled this mixture of 2D sprites for the UI & scenario and 3D models for the entities? I’d like to google more about this.
How is it applied to monogame? Is it difficult to implement a system which does something like this:
Layer 1: draw 2D tiled terrain
Layer 2: Draw entity’s 3D models (Player, NPSs, objects, etc)
Layer 3: Draw UI elements (HUD, conversation boxes, etc)
How is the perspective handled in this type of games? Being the 3D models on top of a 2D scenario, how are shadows applied?
Sorry about the long post, I don’t know much about game development.
I’d realy appreciate any guidence.