Project ISO

Isometric projection is one of my favorite game stylization, and Project ISO was my first attempt to challenge myself and create a custom isometeric “engine”. At the time I only worked with C#, so the obvious choice was to build the whole concept on top of the Monogame framework and it served me well.

I didn’t really know what challenges awaited me, so I set up the project and started to build the structure. After I created the basic structure of the project, my next task was to write my own system that parses the map metadata from Tiled editor and then render it. Then I figured out how to write a custom abstraction of the map view (camera), how to create an asynchronous resource loading system and how to handle scenes. I spent most of my time testing the rendering itself. In the beginning I was rendering 1000x1000 tiles at 30fps max. Then I ended up using canvas to render the map only if there was a change. This method itself brings many fps, but unfortunately also many limitations. In the end I chose a system where I only render tiles that are seen in the FOV of the camera. Kind of like “occlusion culling” only much simplified.

When I was happy with the result, I started to figure out how to further improve the project. I implemented an interesting Moonsharp library to integrate the Lua interpreted language and I planned to implement all the game entity logic in it. I also implemented an open source library for fx particles, which I had to modify slightly. Finally, I invited a friend to start working on the GUI.

Project ISO was also my first game project which I tested on Linux :)