After Happy Farm and FarmVille attracted millions of user there is a lot of talking about isometric games. I've played several games featuring an isometric view then I've spent some thoughts around the idea of creating my own isometric game (or one for my company, developed during my inexistent free time).
Looking for isometric game engines, I found three great projects: FFilmation, As3isolib and OpenSpace.
- Have a programming interface as small and easy as possible, no matter how complex the internal code is;
- Rendering performance is a major concern when designing all the algorythms;
- Graphic designers are able to work on the application’s ( game or not ) environments without any programming skills, visually, and with almost immediate previews of what they are doing.
- Simple scene creation;
- 3 primitive types;
- Base class for displaying user-created conten;
- Plenty of styling option on vector based primitive;
- Integrates well with a variety of tween engine;
- Improved 3D isometric positional sortin;
- Scene & view renderer classes geared towards performance optimizatio;
- Performance caching of static and animated sprite asset.
OpenSpace (commercial, part of the SmartFoxServer platform for multiplayer games):
- Engine and framework for rapid development of multi-user virtual worlds and MMO communities;
- Customizable tiles' aspect ratio;
- Tiles Elevation
- 2D objects in a 2.5D world
- Backgrounds and foregrounds
- Scrolling
- Advanced pathfinding
- Powerful avatar management
- Advanced map interaction system
- Exhaustive documentation
- Complete Map Editor
If you were planning to develop an isometric game, you just found your first step.
My name is Fernando Bevilacqua, I am a Computer Science professor at