Sorry I did not manage to insert image and text in the same post,

I was wondering how hard doing something like this would be in unity ? BecauseI have been interested in making a 3D version of a fixed camera adventure game with a bit of gameplay (and 3D characters) but the 3D environment rendering and all the assets it would require were really what was holding me back from going further than thinking about it … do you think something like this concept could be viable ? and how can I actually implement it ?

@walzo

walzo said:

3D environment rendering and all the assets

3D rendering is kinda cheap today. “Alone in the dark” already rendered the environment on quite slow hardware because it had only to be done for each camera once. You would at least need some 3d collision surface. Maybe you can draw on this surface. Depending on your art-style this may simplify lightning or fog or texture-mapping (wooden floor) independent of the resolution of the display. You know the math already from the characters.

I participated on an adventure game in Unity back in 2013. The game used a simple 3D plane and NavMesh, anything was white boxed and then in a second camera blended just the rendered character and interacteable objects into the background. Render to texture and maybe a simple shader are your friend here, but you have to be very cautios to have the right perspective for the background or else anything would look realy strange

If you don't need particularly accurate collision models, something like this is quite easy. Biggest problem is camera limitations; you can't really have it change perspective very much, but you mention it's fixed so I suppose that's not a problem. An advantage to this is that you can always present to the player to the view you want them to see. As for implementation, you can check out games like Ocarina of Times's pre-rendered rooms (usually houses and shops, can't really think of anything more modern off the top of my head lol). You will need to create simple box collisions to simulate the 3D objects and their supposed location and rough dimensions. Just play to your strengths with a format like that and “abuse” it everywhere you can.

Thanks a lot for all your responses ?

I now have a better grasp of the opportunities this method offers, its limitation, as well as solid leads on how I can try and implement it.

Those were exactly the answers I was looking for ?