00:00Hollywood Animal is a tycoon strategy game where you're the boss of your own film studio.
00:05With a game like this, we faced a fundamental question from early development.
00:08Should we make it 2D or 3D?
00:11For most genres, the answer to this question is practically predetermined.
00:14But with strategy games, it's not so obvious.
00:17These days, 3D is more convenient, more practical, and often faster to produce.
00:22But we still lean towards 2D.
00:24We wanted Hollywood Animal to evoke fond memories of Theme Park or Railroad Tycoon 2.
00:29Or Caesar 3.
00:312D gives the artist more control over style and atmosphere,
00:34making the game feel more intimate and handcrafted.
00:37Which we felt was more important in a game where you build something up and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
00:42But there's one small problem.
00:432D is, well, two-dimensional. Literally flat.
00:47No matter how many animations and effects you add,
00:49all the buildings and objects in a 2D game are paper cutouts glued to a cardboard canvas.
00:54In any strategy game, you spend a lot of time hovering over your domain and moving the camera back and forth.
00:59But in a 2D game, the individual images or sprites and the overall environment have zero reaction to any of this.
01:06There's no sense of perspective, no parallax movement or depth.
01:09Everything is just painted flat on the screen.
01:12Then, one of our developers suddenly remembered an old solution to this problem from a game in a totally different genre.
01:18Diablo II, a 2D isometric game featuring the perfect depth effect.
01:23The programmers at Blizzard designed a clever system which distorts sprites
01:27so they become smaller as they move away from the camera, creating a sense of perspective.
01:31Maybe we should revisit this half-forgotten technique and try something similar.
01:35To make it all work, so each building, bench and tree can distort correctly in perspective,
01:40we started by drawing a simple two-dimensional mesh for every sprite in the game.
01:44Sometimes layers of it.
01:46We then projected the 2D sprites onto the meshes.
01:49And then, finally came the painstaking, exhausting work of setting height values for every vertex in every single sprite.
01:58So here's to our artist, who did the whole thing by himself.
02:02Thanks to this approach, we feel like Hollywood Animal combines the best of 2D and 3D strategy games
02:08and sets itself apart visually from other games in the genre.
02:12Was any of this really necessary?
02:14Of course not!
02:16But isn't that what creativity is all about?
02:18Giving yourself a weird challenge, focusing on a problem that barely existed
02:21and then spending disproportionate amounts of resources solving it
02:25in the faint hope that two or three really attentive players might notice and appreciate it?
02:30Maybe you don't play Hollywood Animal for its incredibly detailed movie-making system,
02:35the golden age of Hollywood atmosphere, the employee management, plus a thousand funny stories along the way.
02:40But maybe you'll play it because the buildings become slightly distorted in perspective as you move the camera.
02:46It's something to think about!
