Chapter 5. Putting Things into Perspective

We will now see how to render another very popular kind of effect: the top-down perspective (also known as overhead perspective). There are a wide variety of games that can be created using this technique:

• Hack and slash like Gauntlet

• Shoot 'em up like Alien Breed

• RPG like Zelda or Chrono Trigger

• Simulation like Simcity

• War game like Civilization or Warcraft

These games use what is called an orthogonal projection. This can be easily rendered using a simple tile map like the one we implemented in the last chapter. In this chapter, we will make an RPG that will look like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on Super Nintendo.

We will use the graphical assets from BrowserQuest (http://browserquest.mozilla.org), a very cool open source game developed by Mozilla to demonstrate the capability of modern browsers. You can see it in the following screenshot:

In this chapter we will cover the following topics:

• Tile map optimization

• Sprite-level occlusion

• Advanced...