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[delphonso]

Hmm, maybe we can all pitch in as some sort of week-long jam-like activity once or twice a year. Just see what Bay12 can come up with in a week. There's enough artists, musicians and programmers here for like...ten teams at least.

[IndigoFenix]

Also, nobody is tapping into my favorite game type: Ultimate Spreadsheet Simulators. Boxes of Numbers, Hopefully Increasing with Player Help!

Does this catch your interest, EuchreJack?
I'm doing my best to make it as user-friendly as possible but I expect that finding an audience will be difficult.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Iris]

Hmm, maybe we can all pitch in as some sort of week-long jam-like activity once or twice a year. Just see what Bay12 can come up with in a week. There's enough artists, musicians and programmers here for like...ten teams at least.

I'd be interested in that. if I knew any programming but shhhhhh

[EuchreJack]

Also, nobody is tapping into my favorite game type: Ultimate Spreadsheet Simulators. Boxes of Numbers, Hopefully Increasing with Player Help!

Does this catch your interest, EuchreJack?
I'm doing my best to make it as user-friendly as possible but I expect that finding an audience will be difficult.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's certainly interesting, but I'm unsure what the player can play.

[IndigoFenix]

Also, nobody is tapping into my favorite game type: Ultimate Spreadsheet Simulators. Boxes of Numbers, Hopefully Increasing with Player Help!

Does this catch your interest, EuchreJack?
I'm doing my best to make it as user-friendly as possible but I expect that finding an audience will be difficult.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's certainly interesting, but I'm unsure what the player can play.

It's an open-ended, fully moddable demographics simulator that I'm making into a game.  The central premise of the "official" scenarios will mostly revolve around analyzing and then managing a disease.

That picture is a prototype for one of the earlier, simpler levels.  You will be given three possible treatments, one of which greatly improves the chance of recovery, one which slightly improves it, and one which does nothing (randomly determined).  You must administer them to patients, analyze which proportion of each test subjects recover or die, and once you have determined the most effective treatment, switch over to use that treatment exclusively in order to save as many people as possible.

This is one of the simpler stages.  Later ones throw more complex ideas into the mix, like managing the spread of the disease itself, allocating limited resources, analyzing and managing side effects of different treatments, dealing with multiple demographic groups that might each be affected by the disease in different ways, managing multiple diseases at once, managing public opinion (which itself is modeled like a disease), and so on.

Some stages will involve things that are not actually diseases but could be modeled like one, for instance trying to win an election, managing economic policy or stopping (or instigating) a rebellion.

[King Zultan]

Sounds interesting, I'd play it.

[EuchreJack]

Sounds interesting, I'd play it.

+1

...although as a self-professed gun nut, I'm worried about the comparisons that have been made between disease control and gun control.

Although as a COVID survivor, I now know disease control is also mostly politicized garbage. 
For example, anyone actually surprised the masks & COVID disappear RIGHT BEFORE the upcoming midterm elections?  I sure as hell expect the masks back, although arguably it depends which side wins to some degree.

[King Zultan]

I have a feeling that guns are harder to get rid of than a disease.

[EuchreJack]

I have a feeling that guns are harder to get rid of than a disease.

...try telling a Democrat that. 

But still interested in the Simulator.

[Telgin]

So, I assume discussing game mechanic design is on topic here, right?

I'm trying to figure out how to design a real time overhead 2D game, essentially a twin stick shooter, that allows some implementation of multiple z-levels and flight.  Think old JRPG style graphics, not isometric, to save on complexity.

It may be difficult to convey what I'm trying to do without images, so maybe this makes it more clear, based on a quick mockup from an image I found on Google:



I'd like for the player to be able to do things like jump up on that box, or climb the stairs up to the higher area, and for the z-levels to matter somehow.  The problems I'm seeing with this are that I can't think of any way to make the projectiles from the player or enemies take it into account in a way that makes sense.

For example, imagine the player was standing behind the box and an enemy shot at them.  The player would expect the box to stop the shot, and that they also wouldn't be able to shoot back.

Now, if the player were standing atop the box, the enemies should be able to shoot at them and vice-versa.  That's easy to implement by having projectiles just ignore collisions for the box, but... that isn't compatible with also allowing it to provide cover for characters on the same level as it.

There are some ways I can see to implement this, but they're quite complicated, maybe going so far as implementing the collision as 3D shapes with 2D graphics.  But even if I went that far, I can't see how characters would be able to meaningfully select which z-level they're shooting at.  NPCs could just silently do it behind the scenes by selecting whatever z-level their target is on, but how would the player do it?  I was envisioning mouse aiming so maybe it's just implied to be on the same level as the character unless the mouse hovers over a target on another level, but that feels like it's a bit clunky.  Not to mention I can see lots of complications on how that would work in practice when shooting at tall buildings or trees, such as how you get the projectiles to recognize that despite being shot toward a z-level 5 target for example that it should collide with a 3 z-level high wall on the way if it doesn't have time to reach the needed height.

My hope was to build this all in Godot and leverage as much of its built in systems as possible.  I guess anything is possible if you write custom collision code...

Does anyone know of a game that does anything like this?  I'd love to review how it works if there is.  The only alternative I can envision is making it turn based like X-COM or Fallout, which wouldn't be impossible but isn't the feel I wanted to go for.

[eerr]

I know a game that has tangled with this sort of stuff before: Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past

Problem being, they didn't really solve all the issues either.

Perspective is actually the worse issue for these games.

Like, the dark world in ALTTP has giants that throw bombs, but the bombs don't fall the height of the giant. They just fly in an arc like the player threw them.
Under the wrong circumstances, the monsters/perspective or even the magic mirror can cause people nausea. Usually that's because the perspective is messed up, trying to fit creatures and terrain and weapons with some sort of depth.
(if you don't believe me, remember that the title screen literally has a sword with an eye in it, as a symbol, an eye-sore)

Still a really good game, after I got used to the messed up perspective.
Note that fireballs, like from the zora or gannon, are not free-flowing in every direction. They are locked to moving at certain angles.
You might have trouble making a full 360 degree projectiles work.

I got some of those messed up perspective vibes from hyper light drifter too, not sure how they solved it. There may be some sort of magic or wizardry involved

[Telgin]

Interesting, I hadn't even considered the 2D Zelda games, but I guess they are in some ways similar to what I'm looking to do.  I imagine that they try to limit the problems by using level design to not introduce these perspective problems more than they have to, but I wanted to make it a cityscape so that's not really going to work for me.

I'm wondering if I can get away with doing it with 3D physics... and may just have to test it to see.  Maybe I can use visual cues like illumination and drop shadows to help indicate z-levels, but I'm betting it won't be that simple.

2D is going to introduce other problems too, like the movement angles of characters and projectiles, like you mentioned.  This really is something I should be using 3D graphics for, and did get working pretty well in 3D.  Content and level creation was just so slow compared to drawing 2D sprites...

[IndigoFenix]

That kind of perspective silliness was pretty much ubiquitous in the pre-3D era.  It's weird if you think about it, but for the most part players just didn't care.  Remember that gameplay > realism, and "projectile hurts you when its hitbox intersects your hitbox" is a lot easier to deal with than trying to figure out what Z-level you're on relative to the object.

In fact the Zelda games often ignored Z-levels even when it wouldn't have been hard to implement.  If you ignore background elements it's pretty trivial from a technical standpoint to make flying enemies that hover at a particular height, with a drop shadow showing their XY position, but mostly it just makes gameplay more annoying, so flying enemies never go out of range of your sword.

In fact in Link's Awakening there are some enemies that DO have a drop shadow a good distance below them, like the birds (which divebomb you) and ghosts (which bob around randomly), but the hitbox is actually the position of the enemy sprite itself on-screen, so you can walk "up" and hit them even when logically they should be over your head and to the south.  This makes no sense but when you're playing it's a lot easier to deal with them than waiting for them to swoop down or having to jump up to hit them.  There are other enemies that jump out of your way to dodge your attacks and these cannot be hit when they are in the air, so it's not like they didn't know how to make pseudo-3D.

This is a particularly egregious use of perspective warping but it's a good example of how in 2D games they just didn't give a hoot about spatial fidelity when game feel was on the line, so if you're going to imitate their style I'd advise adopting a similar philosophy or you're likely to run into problems.

[Egan_BW]

I actually know of a modern game with the aLttP style perspective and twin stick shooting. Game is called Unsighted if you want to look at it for inspiration.

Oh yeah, and Hyper Light Drifter also fits the description.

[Telgin]

Thanks for the suggestions, since it looks like both games are essentially doing what I wanted even if they both seem to have a bigger focus on melee attacks.  I'll do a bit of digging and see if I can learn anything about how they implemented the physics.