2D or not 2D

Well, the convention is over and we survived. And now after a month, we're back at it. However, we received loads of great feedback and noticed some things that we could definitely improve. Since we never really posted a screenshot, I'll put one up so it can then be forgotten after I tell you our next move.

You might not be able to see, but the current version includes a very block-y 3D world with 2D sprites overlaid on the top. It made a bunch of things relatively easy, but introduced several problems that I believe were unnecessarily introduced by using 3D. I'll just name a few.

1. Making tiles that were dynamic pieces of art (for example, with grass that overlaps another tile) instead of obviously textured cubes is much easier (in my humble opinion) to achieve with 2D.
2. The performance was starting to drop a little, but that might have been my naivete with Unity.
3. I found a very nice asset to handle isometric tiles that vastly reduces the amount of programming necessary.

Aside from personal preference, I think this revamp was a good move. As this is our first project, I have been learning how to use Unity and program with their component based architecture. As with anything, there were growing pains, but I think I finally realized the best practices. I will admit that the code had grown from experimental to a patched together architecture. However, it was quickly becoming a monolith that wouldn't scale very well, so I decided to redesign it with a proper architecture and best practices. One of these decisions was to simplify things with a 3rd party library and to use 2D. The rebuild still in the early stages, but based on what I've learned up to this point, I think it will be a step in the right direction. In a later post, I will go over more details about what I've learned and my ideas about how best to utilize Unity.