Pikuma: Isometric Projection in Game Development

Eidos published an isometric game I coded in the 90s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Proje...

This article doesn't go into what a bitch isometric is. I remember spending a full day just on the calculation to go from 2D mouse pointer position->3D x,y,z tile position being clicked on.

And the game was supposed to be all pixel art. But then you have to render thousands of frames of bitmaps for the characters to have 8 DoF with every frame of every action they can make (walk, run, shoot, climb, etc), which adds up to a quadrillion MB of graphics. So during development it was decided the game would be 3D poly characters over 2D iso tile backgrounds. So, converting the whole game was fun. Those were the days before 3D engines really existed. The 3D engine was the one you wrote.

I’ve had an obsession with isometric rendering and related art since I first played SimCity 2k and love seeing content like this! I wrote a basic game using MonoGame and my own renderer for Tiled to get a better understanding. I had it running on an early Windows Phone 7 device butter smooth and found it a fun exercise to try and replicate some of the interactions from the games I liked as a kid. Obviously even a 1Ghz ARM processor is miles ahead of what SimCity and other great titles ran on, so was kind of “cheating”.

Something I’d like to read more of is supporting things like fixed rotation and strategies for depth/Z index from real games with code examples. I remember getting a bit stuck on animations of tall sprites with other game objects not rendering in the correct order. Eg a highway overpass or bridge with people/cars underneath. Would definitely pay for quality tutorials with code examples.

Edit: this is the first I’ve heard of Pikuma, this looks great well done!

I'm not 100% sure what I think about Pikuma. Gustavo is a good teacher, his methods are fairly well explained and easy to understand, but sometimes he doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.

I took his first ECS game engine course, and it was good for a few hours, but halfway through the course it was clear he hadn't really understood what ECS is and was implementing his understanding of it.

I took his updated course which he'd overhauled and it seems he now properly understands ECS and the course was much better.

Loved the article, thank for sharing! I remember as a kid, being a big fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon, I wanted to create my own isometric game. I made it in The Games Factory, which was a no-code drag and drop game maker tool. I remember that I loved working out all the coordinate calculations from screen to tile and vice versa, like the stuff written in the article. I wanted to build a Camping Site Tycoon with lakes and water glides, but I abandoned the project. Thanks for sharing!

Loved the article, thank for sharing! I remember as a kid, being a big fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon, I wanted to create my own isometric game. I made it in The Games Factory, which was a no-code drag and drop game maker tool. I remember that I loved working out all the coordinate calculations from screen to tile and vice versa, like the stuff written in the article. I wanted to build a Camping Site Tycoon with lakes and water glides, but I abandoned the project. Thanks for sharing!

Wow! I did not know Rollerecoaster Tycoon was programmed in assembly!! This is super cool.

Pikuma is awesome. +1 for this article that also is awesome.

I played Age of Empires. Is AoE considered isometric?

The site pikuma is a hidden gem. It's really good.

what a coincidence!!! Just today saw his youtube video on 4x4 matrices.. and today I found him here also :)