Space. 2d or 3D?

I am blorg post. Also I am ill. So grah, apologies. Nice to see Ratchet changed the due date to saturday haha. Work on Friday puts a real crimp in your time - but more on organising (or failing to) a small studio around a life later.

So you wanna make a space game?

Space is inherently 3d. Humans think in 2d. Computer screens are 2d.

Strategy games like C&C have such success cos they present 3d in a 2d manner. Specifically here 2 or 3 planes - ground, underwater & air.

Strategy games like Homeworld (this pains me) were amazing, but limited. People tended to fight on flat planes, even when they had the full 3d movement available to them. Why?

Lets look at psychology and design as two major aspects of this.

Psychologically our instinctive idea of vertical movement is walking up a hill or jumping. We think of the world being flat with an upwards area where we can move into. This is evidenced by the fact i didn't even mention walking down a hill or ducking.

To us our world is 2d. If it was 3d we'd have designed 3d displays before we designed 2d.

I don't even mean 3d images. I mean a literal 3d display. Things in front of and behind. Above and below.

How would you design a room? From above, with layers vertically - straight back to 2d planes.

Design wise if we design a spaceship with guns (why design it any other way!?) then 90% of the weapons would have to be on the central plane. This means they can fire upwards and downwards. If your spaceship is interesting it has guns on the top and the bottom. To achieve maximum firepower with this design you're going to have to align your ship in a certain way... probably on a flat plane with the enemy.

So where does this lead us? Keep it simple. By arranging your ships on a flat plane but adding in enough 3d to make it 3d you can add the fun, not a big overcomplicated mess of control systems infront of your game.

Simulation will be keeping most ships to a flat plane, but unmanned drones fly above or below these ships, along with COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF TORPEDOES.

Why?

It keeps control of an already complex ship simple. It also keeps depth in the game by adding over and under weapons. Hey, he's got less anti-missile weapons on the top of him, lets rearm our missiles on the top of our ship and nuke him!

Feenk about it.