The team is talking about changing the current side view battle system, but we want to discuss with everyone else first before committing. The primary reason for changing is mainly because it doesn't fit with the scale of the battles at the story + the other issues that keeps on piling one after another with regards to the fake 3d weapons and ships + fluidity of the gameplay/performance (+the backer ships).
Pros of the Top-Down view in our gameplay system:
1. Same top-down-ish bg instead of creating another side view bg = faster production.
2. Performance wise, we'll be using 2d sprites instead of 3d models (it doesn't really change visually all that much) so it adds more units in battle and more room for smoothness/visual effects and the battles can potentially scale from a small mission to a grand mission (5~15 UTV vs 20~30 Ares units + more waves).
3. Welp... Long term, this is better, because porting to mobile or w/e won't be too tedious whereas if using the 3D models, we'll have to go through optimizing them further.
4. Backers will just need to do the top down silhouette of the ship and/or apply textures (or using our premade lego blocks), since there are many top down games, they can easily take references for the shapes.
5. In the weapon installation and grouping screen, you'll just need to install the weapons on "top view" instead of rotating top/down/left/right which also provides us simpler UI.
6. You can start literally at any point of the battle without feeling awkward.
Cons of the top view implementation:
1. The top view of the current ships aren't that established, but one thing i can say is that they're all... Thin biscuits at the moment. However, producing the 2D ships doesn't really take a lot of time (especially now that we have a full texture set), considering their scale in game, plus I'll just do it similarly to how the backers will do their ship, like decide the shapes/each parts, place texture (based from the existing designs), repaint a bit to make it look natural then that's it.
2. The current code needs to be changed, but this change isn't anything too hard, and rather it makes everyone's lives easier.
Pros of the current side view system:
1. It's fancy, more cinematic (especially if a different/more detailed background is used)
2. it's the current implemented system so we just have to sail forward.
3. The ships yaw whenever they take continuous damage + fanciness.
4. Pressing H to rotate makes people go "lol the ships are in 3D. MIND. BLOWN." ( - Youko )
5. We can potentially add 3d lighting which will go terribly wrong performance wise with the way how the weapons check distances between other ships
Cons:
1. Just as stated in #5, the ships may be in 3d, but the 3d lighting per explosions and stuff will be costly. I'll give you an idea how it's unthinkable for our game to be so expensive:
If this was a typical shmup, say 1vs100, that's fine, since 1x100 of loop of checks.
However , the UTV can potentially have 5~15 units. Fighting against 30 ares units are 15x30 = 900 loop of checks, that's how insane it is. Not to mention, our missiles counts as objects to be checked since they can be intercepted. Just imagine if both sides' ships has around 10 each... D; Anyway, top down allows us to make use of full 2d solutions rather than the current 2d-3d.
2. You can only start on the right or left. Some missions portraying that you're surrounded feels a little odd.
3. The scale of the war couldn't be felt much, unless we group the enemies by waves to optimize performance.