I’m going to create a ‘simple’ evade all enemies and get out of some place game, with stealth and all that. 2D, top-down view, nothing fancy. The first step was to render the world with line of sight. I’ve just finished that, but there are some unforeseen issues with it. Here’s a picture of what it looks like right now:

You control the direction you’re looking at with the mouse, and you can’t see behind you. I added a few blocks in the room, which you can see. Well, you can’t. You only see the shadows cast by it. Because I want the game to be 2D and not 3D, you cannot ‘see’ walls (like in the old GTA games). At first I thought that would be ok, but now I’m having doubts. You see, when moving around, those shadow cast by the geometry look like 3D pillars that go up in the sky. So, accidentally, it looks like the old GTA games but with black buildings instead of textured buildings. Oops.

So I’ll have to figure out a way to make it look like it’s 2D (which it is), while still keeping shadows like that. Any ideas are welcome, but I’m going to try and add an offset to the shadows so you can still see a little bit of wall before it goes black.

Now it’s time for food, and then I’ll try to fix that. If I can’t get it to look decent in a few hours, then I’ll just keep it as it is now and work on the gameplay. When that’s done, I can always revisit it if I want to. Still, I’m very happy with the result.

Tags: progress, screenshot, xna