Ongoing MMO Design Thread
This is somewhat for my own project, but I also think it would be great for people to discuss aspects of game design that are overlooked. I intend to use it to poll people's opinion's of different game design ideas.
I'll also have more technical questions, like the one I'm going to ask here.
Since my project intends to have your mouse location determine which direction you face, I need to be able to see a character turn around fully. How many frames would a sprite need to feel natural while turning? 16 seems a little on the low side.
I think 16 would be good. May I ask why your game would need that functionality. (just curious)
So that control of the character feels complete. I've never liked the idea of target and auto-attack.
So you think 8 directional movement would be enough? (for your game)
If you need more than 8 directions, you should probably make the game from above (like your looking straight down from a helicopter).
I think that would be weird personally.
I don't think he is talking about directions of movement, but directions that the character graphic is facing. Purely a visual thing.
So they could be facing north and move west? That sounds interesting.
Edit: Didn't mean to double post like that.
I might go as far as to reduce movement speed unless you're moving in a similar direction to where you're facing. I want to give the feeling of sidestepping and backing up. Realistically it would be a lot easier to be running forward and casting/shooting a bow/swinging a sword than it would be if you're running to the side or especially backing up.
If you go the fully top-down approach (GTA 1/2 style), you can just rotate the sprite itself. If you the sprites are hand-created, 4 will probably be all you'd want to do. Otherwise, you'd likely want to create 3d models and pre-render them like Diablo II did, in which case 16 would be fine, but you could easily go more since its all automatic.