Research on the isometric perspective, day 1

So, today we started to experiment a little on how to make this game a reality with an isometric perspective.

One great tutorial was found on the developer of Game Maker's web site, yoyogames.com.

Tutorial: 3-Dimensional Games (zip file, 1.1 MB)

Help us a lot with realizing that the programming didn't have to be that advanced to have the character walk behind walls and be visible through walls in a good way (which is something we had discussed that we thought could be a big problem to solve). For my own reference I'll just make a quick list here:

* Solved the problem with depth (for example getting behind walls) by setting the value of depth on objects to -y
* Solved the problem with the character disappearing behind walls, thus being harder to control, by making him visible with an outline. This is made possible by having an outline on top of the character at all times, with a value on it's depth that always puts it on top of all other instances.

While the others to in our sub group research their parts, one of them trying to animate sprites in all 8 directions we'll be needing (this is one thing that makes us doubt the perspective, LOTS of time for animations in 8 different directions), I took a file merged between the cube character demo I did and one that was a test on isometric environmental objects (like floors and walls) and started playing around with what we'd learned.

The result was a, rather buggy but still, room with cubic hog zombies going after the player, avoiding each other as well as walls. These could be killed but not much more.

Just some half an hour ago I looked at the file again, just wanted to clean some things up. Ended up with:

* Fixing a problem where the bullet didn't stop at one zombie, but continued through and could kill many zombies in a row.
* Making the player killable by zombies. This sends the player outside of the playable area, so needs a fix later on. Can't just destroy the player instance, since the zombies are searching for it and destroying it returns an error.
* Extending the playable area with a "corridor" to see how it felt to explore a bigger map.

Still needs a lot of work and we might even end up not using this. But we'll continue working on this until Friday and I'm planning to share what we have come up with no matter if we'll scrap it or not.

All for today, tomorrow we'll start writing on the story and hopefully progress on this research.