2D Game Interiors

This week has been a week of playing and replaying… I mean researching… some of the 2D games that have inspired me for this project. There are a lot of 2D and 2.5D games that handle interiors very well. I want to specifically look at a few case studies to see if we can draw from their implementation to influence how we want to handle our interior space.

• Disco Elysium - Probably one of my favorite games visually. I love how they isolate the interior and just black out everything else. It forces you to focus on the space you’re in and brings the immersion up a notch.

  

• Cult of the Lamb - They do a similar approach for their procedural forest areas as well as their interiors. In the case of the Temple, you can get a bigger feel of what that interior is than what its represented at your base.

  

• Mandrake - This one isn’t out yet, but their Ghibli-inspired, hand-painted style is just beautiful.

  

  They seem to vary up the camera angle depending on which interior you’re entering. You have a top down, straight on overhead view (above), familiar to the likes of Stardew Valley. And You have a 3/4 isometric view (below), similar to a lot of early pre-rendered RPGs.

  

• Songs of Glimmerwick - Lastly, we have the team at Eastshade who has gone in-depth on how they achieved their illustrative 2D look on their dev videos and streams. They put a huge emphasis on world-building, and you can really see it in how the interiors feel like a natural extension of the art.

  

The examples above all have one thing in common... they pull focus to the interiors by blacking out the rest of the world. And they use a scene transition when you walk inside… that is there’s a cut from the exterior, and a load to the interior. This gives the dev’s more real estate to work with… especially in the case of Cult of the Lamb. You can have your exterior building be represented in smaller scale, making the outer world feel bigger. When you transition into the inside, you can make this a larger scale, making the interior feel bigger. You get the best of both worlds.

For our project, we wanted to try something different. We wanted to see if we could make a 1:1 transition... where the size of the building on the outside matches exactly when you walk inside. As a proof of concept, the prototype actually works… but I’m starting to think we might need to try the other methods too.

Thinking back on when we made the Talos I Space Station for Prey, it was a pretty ambitious design to keep the environment 1:1. I’m not sure if folks knew that because of the loading screens between transitions. That would meanYou could travel from the Arboretum all the way down to Cargo Bay if you wanted to. But it would take you a hell of a lot longer than waiting for a loding screen. You would feel like you’ve traveled the distance. Now that’s immersive sim… amirite

There’s probably a good reason why a lot of games chose to do scene transitions instead of 1:1 representations, and that’s probably something we need to prototype and experiment with also. I’m not sure if the camera angle works, but revisiting all of these games has also gotten me rethinking our camera view too though. I really do love that isometric 3/4 view. It reminds me of the days of pre-rendered, isometric cameras of days past. I’ll look into it…