Posts Tagged 3d
A Layman’s Guide to Projection in Videogames
Posted by The Management in art on April 11, 2009
Oftentimes when a videogame has a skewed, overhead point of view, we call it isometric. That’s rarely the accurate term, though, and it’s not just pointless semantics.
Although Echochrome uses a single projection type, its gameplay is based on constantly rotating and morphing its 3D structures. With each new view, the physical architecture of the level changes to reflect what the player sees on the screen.
Projection basically means taking a three dimensional object and displaying it on a 2D plane (i.e., a screen). There are various ways of accomplishing this, and each technique has a deep impact on a game’s look and mechanics. The advent of 3D games and free-floating cameras somewhat lessened this role, but being aware of the pros and cons of each projection type is still applicable to both 2D and 3D titles.
So what exactly are these projection types? Well, let’s take a look:
Paper Moon Bits and GAMMA 3D
Posted by The Management in games on February 13, 2009
Edge (probably the best overall videogame magazine still in print) recently ran a feature on Kokoromi‘s GAMMA 3D challenge. The focus of the event was stereoscopic imaging in videogames; in layman’s terms, the red and blue glasses that make things “3D.” Jason Rohrer‘s Passage made waves after last year’s GAMMA 256 challenge, so I was curious to see what Kokoromi’s latest event would showcase.
Well, Fireflies definitely looked interesting, as did all the other entries, really, but most of them haven’t yet been made public. The demo of Infinite Ammo‘s Paper Moon is available right now, though, so I decided to check it out.
The intro to the surreal Paper Moon.
Bullets:
- Obviously, a stereoscopic graphic presentation.
- All art consists of jagged paper cutouts. The art was initially hand-drawn on paper with a Sharpie, then scanned in and touched up in Photoshop.
- Jumping is only accompanied by “shifting,” a mechanic that — in real-time — swaps the layer property of certain on-screen objects. This effectively pushes things into the background pulls them into the foreground, with the character usually finding himself somewhere in between.
- Death is not really penalized on account of frequent checkpoints and unlimited continues, and it’s actually required to solve some of the puzzles.
- Paper Moon contains a hard, 5 minute time-limit, but that’s simply a result of Kokoromi’s submission guidelines.
About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I'm the Creative Lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and when I find the time, I post those thoughts here on this blog.
