Shadowrun Returns Post-funding Updates #47-48

Two new updates have gone live for Shadowrun Returns now-funded Kickstarter, one outlining the deadline for upgrading your backer level and the second being a meaty dev diary penned by lead artist Mike McCain. I’m going to quote from the second:

Shadowrun Returns mixes 3D characters, lighting & effects with a 2D isometric environment – a decision made early in our Kickstarter campaign. This hybrid approach gives us the best of both worlds from both a visual and art production standpoint. By going (old school) with 2D environments, we’re able to create much broader and more intricate environments than we’d have the time for in a full 3D game. Plus, painting the building blocks of the world directly allows us to stand out more with a rich, detailed rendering style.

2D isometric games generally use either pre-rendered environments (the Infinity Engine games) or tile-based environments (Fallout, Arcanum, Diablo). Pre-rendered environments are ultimately hand-crafted by artists and “baked out” as a single, finished environment – whereas a tiled environment remains a collection of many assembled parts. It’s a plastic toy vs. a box of Legos. Shadowrun Returns uses a tile-based environment. While a pre-rendered approach could provide some more artistic freedom, modular tile-based art is more production-friendly and offers our designers far more flexibility to create and iterate on complex tactical combat spaces. It also, importantly, lets all of you guys build your own environments in the editor using our digital Legos!

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Lighting – Thanks to some really cool engineering work, we’re able to place directional and point lights within our environments. How does lighting in a 2D game work? The short version is, our art is projected onto some simple 3D geometry so that each prop or tile can receive light from the appropriate directions. Placing lights in our editor is a bit fiddly, but with some trial and error you can get some really nice results from it. (This is an example of what we meant when we said the editor would be (powerful but ugly.))