Cinderdeep devlog

Going 3D

The game was a flat 2D grid until today. One quick 3D test later, everything but the interface moves to 3D.

Until today Cinderdeep was flat: a top-down 2D grid with small drawings for buildings. And it worked. Citizens walked, farms grew. Two days ago I added factory interiors, where you step inside a building and lay out its machines and belts, and yesterday I taught the belts to be dragged out in one stroke instead of placed tile by tile.

The town as it looked in 2D: fields, a river, a lake and the first workshops.
The town as it looked in 2D: fields, a river, a lake and the first workshops.

But every time I pictured the finished game, it wasn’t flat. So I built a quick 3D test, just to see how it would feel. A belt carrying crates and barrels, and a small gantry crane moving goods between them. The pink boxes are stand-ins for models that didn’t exist yet.

The first 3D test: a belt, crates and barrels, and a little gantry crane working over it.
The first 3D test: a belt, crates and barrels, and a little gantry crane working over it.
The same test from the other side, feeding a machine.
The same test from the other side, feeding a machine.

One look was enough. The game goes full 3D over a grid. Buildings, citizens and the insides of factories all become 3D, and only the interface, the buttons and labels, stays 2D.

The grid stays too. The game is still about laying things out on tiles, so the rules don’t change, only how you see them. That left me with one plain problem, sitting right there in the screenshots: those pink boxes. A 3D game needs models, and I had none.