Smashboards

Imagine a 3D game that causes you to actually see in 3D.

If you actually saw in 3D in a 3D universe you would see everything. Like, you would see the entirety of the interior volume of all the characters (so you could see all their internal organs and stuff,) you could see inside terrain, ect. Much like how seeing a 2D view of a 2D universe (I.e. the outside perspective of a camera outside the plane of the 2D world) would let you see inside everything.

couldn't you just do a golf game and/or the undertale battle system.

I could do that but I want the player to feel the full experience of trying to navigate a 2D universe.
…I might be slightly sadistic.

I guess you could make a true 2D golf game with a tangible world by having a ball flying cutscene that's just a square going right or something.

Come to think of it, a raycasted 3D environment (like that seen in Wolfenstein 3D) would probably lend really well to this sort of thing, albeit with a few tweaks. In terms of coding and visuals, a lot of the work's already done; just with some tweaks to the raycasting process.

Basically, where the distance of rays usually calculates wall height (further away = shorter vertical cast), you'd do away with that and have them cast from top to bottom, no matter what (in the process, getting rid of the "floor" and the "ceiling"), then you'd use that distance to instead change the colour of the wall it's casting on (most likely further away = darker). Enemies and pickups could be indicated with solid colours of their own, like red or green, while you could also slightly change the hue of the walls for each "level", and have special wall-objects like doors or switches indicated with their own distinct colours (yellow and blue spring to mind.)


Here's a quick and nasty mockup I threw together in PowerPoint. In this case, we're looking down a corridor, and there's an enemy in front of you, represented with the red line. There are a couple of points that come to mind, with this, obviously;

• The game technically still uses a 2D display, given the lines actually have height rather than just width. That being said, given they're exactly the same no matter how high, I'd say that it works well enough as an illustration of 1D space to be passable. The width and height of lines are your call; more horizontal width essentially means more detail, so make of that what you will.
• HUD elements are obviously going to be really hard to handle. In this particular case, I'm representing Health with notches to the left (2/3), while Ammo is represented with notches to the right (1/3), differentiated from the game world with solid black. (Obviously, they can't be labelled with text.)
• Speaking of colour; you could probably use different colour palettes for different levels to more effectively distinguish them. In this case, I've gone with something more cream-ish, and you'd obviously need to consider different levels of colourblindness with a project like this.)
  • Likewise, I think a "tint" would be a good way to showcase different effects - a slight red tint when damaged, a slight green tint when healing.
• Enemies would likely only be differentiated with different colours, and given pretty much everything is represented with different colours, I'd recommend keeping enemy variety quite minimal; that way, the player isn't forced to memorise that certain colours are enemies while others are useful pickups or objects.
• Projectiles feel like they'd be... difficult, given shooting a physical object at an enemy from far enough away would have the object effectively cover them over. You could solve this with hitscan, but you'd need to indicate when an enemy gets hit; a "flash" on hit could help indicate this quite well, but determining the exact "centre" of your screen in a pinch might be somewhat difficult (so some lee-way would be appreciated.)
  • Perhaps on top of just aiming, you'd also have an element of strategy in choosing to reload? While reloading, you'd be unable to attack.
• To alleviate your limited field of view, I suppose you could potentially consider stereo sound as a means of detecting objects out of view - sparkling sounds for pickups, grunts for monsters, that kind of thing. Helps give you a little more direction, perhaps, and maybe gives the game a synesthetic element by combining sound and vision?

Across the board, a game like this would come with a lot of abstraction by its very nature, and I think that'd mean things would need to be explained in some kind of manual. But hey, that kind of harkens back to the abstraction of the second generation of consoles in some ways, which is a pretty cool thought.

KneeOfJustice99 , yo, this would be a great game for that weird Mac horizontal bar keyboard screen thingie.