2D might never die but modern 3D can be a compelling workflow for producing this kind of content.
The part that gets really painful with 2D sprites is animation. It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D character and then place them into a special scene/camera arrangement for automatic capture into a sprite sheet.
Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.
> Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.
And yet, it's still very common in the indie space. I just played some Vampire Survivors, for example (although I don't think it's very good in terms of art direction, but that aside).
As for the 3d / 2d one, two games come to mind; one is Factorio (of course, it's very popular with software developers) where most assets are created in 3d then converted to 2d sprites. I want to claim it's great for performance given how much Stuff is on screen at any given time (just like Vampire Survivors), but then Satisfactory came out and showed that giant complex player-built factories can also work and perform well in 3D.
The other one is Hollow Knight where all art is hand drawn (digitally I presume but I don't actually know), but rendered in 3d (from a fixed perspective so it still looks and plays like a 2d game), easy parallax and high flexibility in the "spacing" of the layers and I'm sure there's other reasons too.
Vampire Survivors took its sprites from free asset packs. There was controversy over it, allegations that the sprites were ripped from Castlevania games, but ultimately they denied it all, I think.
Seems to have been smoothed out though. The Ode to Castlevania DLC is arguably the best the game has to offer, and apparently with Konami's blessing. "Beating" the level is truly a joy.
bob1029 · · focus · HN ↗
The part that gets really painful with 2D sprites is animation. It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D character and then place them into a special scene/camera arrangement for automatic capture into a sprite sheet.
Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.
Cthulhu_ · · focus · HN ↗
And yet, it's still very common in the indie space. I just played some Vampire Survivors, for example (although I don't think it's very good in terms of art direction, but that aside).
As for the 3d / 2d one, two games come to mind; one is Factorio (of course, it's very popular with software developers) where most assets are created in 3d then converted to 2d sprites. I want to claim it's great for performance given how much Stuff is on screen at any given time (just like Vampire Survivors), but then Satisfactory came out and showed that giant complex player-built factories can also work and perform well in 3D.
The other one is Hollow Knight where all art is hand drawn (digitally I presume but I don't actually know), but rendered in 3d (from a fixed perspective so it still looks and plays like a 2d game), easy parallax and high flexibility in the "spacing" of the layers and I'm sure there's other reasons too.
krige · · focus · HN ↗
220hertz · · focus · HN ↗