How can 2D isometric artstyles be used in Defold?

Questions
1

I have seen some really beautiful isometric style games made with Defold and I wanted to experiment so I created a simple isometric map in Tiled but Defold does not show the tilemap the way it is designed. What are the most effective methods that can be used to create 2D isometric games in Defold?

Thanks in advance.

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2

Defold doesn’t support isometric tiles, so you will have to handle it yourself.

Here’s a description of what I did for my game:

That was a long time ago so tread with caution, I bet there are a lot of inefficiencies.

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Thanks for your quick reply. I have gone through your very helpful description and I wonder if any updates have been made to the engine since you made your post to address the issue.

4

I discuss frustum culling in that thread, that’s something that has been implemented on the engine side.

But in terms of making an isometric tiled world happen - that’s still up to you to implement.

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5

Thanks

6

What do you think is needed to make isometric support native? Something like a camera projection setting perhaps, but what else?

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7

I really don’t feel like the person to ask about this!

A camera projection might be useful for some, but for Fates of Ort we used hand drawn pixel art in that perspective already so not sure if it would be applicable.

Picking tiles screen to world and vice versa was a bit complicated. Not sure if that’s something Defold should support out of the box though.

Maybe look at what Tiled does?

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8

Support for isometric maps from Tiled might help.

9

Isometrics in level creation can be different. It can be a “flat” picture with sprites sorted by z depending on y. (what Tiled does). Or it can be a three-dimensional scene with an orthographic camera set at a fixed angle to the scene. Then all sprites are in XYZ space as models, but in fact are just flat objects, it is convenient to move them on any coordinate, it is easy to calculate the position for character movements, effects, you can add full-weight 3d colliders to interact with the world. Something like this: https://x.com/Mudita_Games/status/1687854977879072768

For this approach, the Defold editor is missing the camera angle settings in the viewport.

I.e. first you need to determine what type of isometrics you need and proceed from that how to make it.

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10

I’ll try this approach and see how it goes. Thanks for your help.