Oh, how many times has that predictable pun been used when discussing games and/or computer graphics?
Anyway, I’ve been asked before why I decided to go 3D for FSU. After all, when the game was conceived it was going to be a 2D beat ‘em up in classic arcade style, so why the change? The answer includes technicalities as well as practicalities.
Let it be known that I love 2D games. There is an intuitiveness that has never been met in gaming (until, arguably, Wii’s introduction) when you plop someone down in front of a controller and a monitor. Up moves your guy up, down moves him down. There is never any question of inverted controls, no messing with camera angles. The game industry’s move to 3D hurt the beat ‘em up genre a great deal, as very few developers ever managed to come up with a targetting system that felt as natural as the 2D classics like Final Fight or Streets of Rage.
Unfortunately, as I discovered, it is difficult to do a 2D sprite-based game at today’s HD resolutions unless you have the luxury of only targetting high-end PC systems with massive amounts of texture memory. It’s not impossible; Super Street Fighter II HD Remix looks very pretty. But the developers have admitted they only just squeezed the game into the available memory on the PS3 and 360, and a beat ‘em up generally requires a larger amount of graphic tiles (the backgrounds are usually bigger than a versus fighter, and there are more than two large animated characters at once). Even though I developed an efficient tile-based renderer for the characters, I was still at two 1024×1024x32 textures for the player with only half of the animations implemented. Multiply that by four for the different player characters, then add multiple enemy sprite pages, then the background tiles, all this on top of the already large amount of memory for the screen buffer, and you can see the problem. Aside from the in-memory requirements, I also have to consider this is going to be distributed online, so the amount of content has to fit under the Community Games limit of 150mb. Sure, compromises could be made - make the characters smaller, use paletted graphics, and so on - but I was not willing to make those changes.
And then you have the practical issues. We’ve seen that a 2D game needs a lot of art, and of course that art actually has to be drawn. Not only does this take a long time (how late was SSF2HDR again?) but it requires a very particular set of talents and different artists make it harder to keep the art consistent. That’s hard enough to manage when you’re a giant developer like Capcom, it’s nigh on impossible when you’re just one guy with some friends. 3D is much more forgiving here; work from multiple contributors is much easier to integrate, and without wishing to insult anyone, it is simply easier to get an acceptable level of quality in 3D art. I certainly do not consider myself an artist, but I do think I can produce adequate 3D assets, whereas I HAVE to use outside artists for 2D work.
So, 3D it is, then. But how do I create the classic arcade beat ‘em up feel now? That goes in the next post.
- SiW
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