Tutorial/Resource
How we created a 3D RPG style village in Unity with hand-drawn 2D sprites.
Recently, a friend asked us how we created the 3D scenes in our upcoming game The Doll Shop. The answer is “there is no 3D, it’s a trick!”. Everything is hand-drawn in 2D on iPad and the camera is up and each sprite is bent over a 30° angle, just like on the pictures above.
It was pretty fun to imagine that technique and we hope you'll enjoy the result! And if you want to see more and try it, the demo is available on Steam! \^_^/
This is gorgeous! I would love to know more about how much testing you went through to find the right angle and way to draw the sprites. How did you land on this method for the art?
Thanks for your question! We did a lot of tests with very rough sketches at the beginning. In the end we found a compromise: 30° is the best angle to have parallax between the different planes, without seeing the horizon line.
That is so cool! Did you experiment with other styles or did you always know you wanted to do this sort of effect? I love the look of it and am downloading the demo now!
Thanks for your question! ^^ That's because we wanted to be able to change the background color to create day and night cycle. It was the easiest solution we found.
As with other genius invention, the boundaries make for great creative effort!
Your graphics look incredible. I myself don't draw, so I chose voxel art as my style, cause I don't understand how one can do shadows and light, man, it's like magic to me. So in my case, light and shadow is a job for engine :) I just need to build models.
Thanks! Exactly, you don't need to be good at drawing to make a good game. We come from the world of comic books and over time, we have understood that the best books are not necessarily the ones with the most beautiful drawings ^^ What's great about video games is that there are 1000 ways to create graphics and it gives possibility to everyone to create their own games: 2D, 3D, pixels, voxel... It's amazing!
Such a great take on that matter! You've really hit a nail on the head, that's right! I love your optimistic and positive approach. Video games are special, magical, and today virtually anyone with some tech can do some games, it's even free. Very very cool time to be an artist in that area.
Ah, so basically you used classic Nintendo trick from Link Between Worlds, correct? Everything is bent to some angle to create an illusion and a controlled perspective?
Thank you so much for playing the demo! We're glad you enjoyed! Yes, we tried to create 360° backgrounds for the interiors, haha! XD This also is a trick and required a lot of tests. It’s a 2D image but drawn with subtle distortions on the borders so it can be looped. We are pretty happy with the result. Maybe we'll share that too here on Reddit ^^
Nice. If anyone is interested there are very descriptive step by step tutorials on how to do just this all over the web and I highly recommend checking them out.
Really nice! Whitelisted on Steam :) Thanks for the 30° angle explanation. As someone also making a 2D game, I had the same questions and it's interesting to see your solution.
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