Hello. I’m new to the forums so I’m not even sure if this is the right place to post this but yesterday I have began work on a small project that I hope to work on in my spare time as a hobby.
I want it to be a old-school Isometric sprite based game, very similar to Diablo 1 and It’s numerous clones that came out during that time.
While I do have experience working in Unreal, It’s mostly working with blueprints, animations and level design. Texture work, Layers and the like are things I always struggled with and still don’t know much about.
My question here is, I’m not sure how the 2.5D character effect is actually done If it’s a 3D character cast onto a 2D plane, so that he can be put on a specific layer, or if you have to create a Paper2D character and give him 8-directional sprites meant to simulate such an effect.
I currently have the default 3D character set up with an Orthographic camera which seems to do the job just fine, but I don’t know how to place him onto a specific layer like in order for-
The sprites to become transparent, but not completely invisible when the character gets behind said sprite/object so that one can see yourself while behind/inside buildings etc but fully visible when outside, for example the roof of a house. I currently cannot even get the character to get behind the sprite due to layering issues due to the aforementioned layering problem.
At the marketplace, there is a 2.5D starter Kit, and at the very last picture, you can see, how they did it with the parts and sprites, that will cover the player. It basically was done by all the main sprites on one layer (let´s call it ground layer), and then, in those areas, that will cover the player, are additional sprites, which are moved above the ground layer, and are probably even higher than the player avatar.
From the cameras perspective, those hovering layers will look like, as if they are part of the ground layer, but since they are literally above the player, they will cover the avater, if he enters this area.
Then you just would need some collision check (box switch?), which affects the transparency of those tiles, as in, making them as transparent, as you like them to be
The starter kit, check the last picture, there you can see the roof tiles hovering above the houses and grass. They just seem to look weird, because they all get rotated to the camera:
