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I Gave Isometric a Chance

Michael
August 2nd, 2004

... then I abandoned it.

Awhile back, I was evaluating the use of isometric graphics for our games. I took a serious look at the pipeline necessary to build something in the scope of the original Marble Madness, and I realized that Photoshop alone wasn't enough.

The first problem was tiling. There was a lot of trial and error in getting pieces to go together smoothly. This is usually the case with all tiling, but you couldn't conveniently visualise the tiles in Photoshop as you were building them. This led to more error than trial.

The second problem was colour consistency. When drawing a basic Isometric cube, you have a shadowed side, a normal side and a bright side. In my case, I wanted to tint the internal highlight lines instead of making them white.

The tough part was ensuring the intensity between colours was always the same. Your right brain tends to notice these intensity variances in your shading if you make rough estimates. This means for every colour I select in Photoshop, I'd have to do some math to get the other colours.

Introducing Isotool

In order to give Isometric art a fair shake, I whipped up a tool to solve both of these problems.

The first problem is solved by a pure hack. You tell IsoTool where on your hard drive a tile is residing, and it polls it for change. If it changes, it reloads and redisplays it in tiled form. This works well, especially if you have a second monitor to display your preview. I created my tiles in Photoshop, hitting Ctrl-s at intervals to see my preview update.

The second problem is solved through an HSV colour selector. When you're in IsoTool, press Ctrl-i to bring it up.

The five white boxes contain hex values for the colours on the cube. I paste them into Photoshop. You drag the HSV sliders to define the cube's colour.

Nevermind.

You won't be seeing any Isometric games coming from Frogtoss Games anytime soon. After giving it an honest shake, I decided against using Isometric artwork in my games. The reason? It looks sterile in bright, colourful games. This works for simulations and image-informational games, but I felt that it fell short for the type of games that I want to create.

Rather than let this tool go to waste, I've packaged it up in case anyone else would like to use it. See to it you don't cut yourself on the edges - it's pretty rough.