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In Hollywood Animal, you'll take the lead of your own film studio, and carve out a place for yourself under the bright Californian sun. But it won't be enough to just place buildings, and hire people, and come up with stories to make into films. After all, you're not the only dreamer in this town. And this time, your competitors aren't the background abstractions you might be expecting in this genre. No, these rivals are cunning, insidious, and willing to cross any line.
Transcript
00:00Hollywood Animal is a tycoon strategy game where you're the boss of your own film studio.
00:05With a game like this, we faced a fundamental question from early development.
00:08Should we make it 2D or 3D?
00:11For most genres, the answer to this question is practically predetermined.
00:14But with strategy games, it's not so obvious.
00:17These days, 3D is more convenient, more practical, and often faster to produce.
00:22But we still lean towards 2D.
00:24We wanted Hollywood Animal to evoke fond memories of Theme Park or Railroad Tycoon 2.
00:29Or Caesar 3.
00:312D gives the artist more control over style and atmosphere,
00:34making the game feel more intimate and handcrafted.
00:37Which we felt was more important in a game where you build something up and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
00:42But there's one small problem.
00:432D is, well, two-dimensional. Literally flat.
00:47No matter how many animations and effects you add,
00:49all the buildings and objects in a 2D game are paper cutouts glued to a cardboard canvas.
00:54In any strategy game, you spend a lot of time hovering over your domain and moving the camera back and forth.
00:59But in a 2D game, the individual images or sprites and the overall environment have zero reaction to any of this.
01:06There's no sense of perspective, no parallax movement or depth.
01:09Everything is just painted flat on the screen.
01:12Then, one of our developers suddenly remembered an old solution to this problem from a game in a totally different genre.
01:18Diablo II, a 2D isometric game featuring the perfect depth effect.
01:23The programmers at Blizzard designed a clever system which distorts sprites
01:27so they become smaller as they move away from the camera, creating a sense of perspective.
01:31Maybe we should revisit this half-forgotten technique and try something similar.
01:35To make it all work, so each building, bench and tree can distort correctly in perspective,
01:40we started by drawing a simple two-dimensional mesh for every sprite in the game.
01:44Sometimes layers of it.
01:46We then projected the 2D sprites onto the meshes.
01:49And then, finally came the painstaking, exhausting work of setting height values for every vertex in every single sprite.
01:58So here's to our artist, who did the whole thing by himself.
02:02Thanks to this approach, we feel like Hollywood Animal combines the best of 2D and 3D strategy games
02:08and sets itself apart visually from other games in the genre.
02:12Was any of this really necessary?
02:14Of course not!
02:16But isn't that what creativity is all about?
02:18Giving yourself a weird challenge, focusing on a problem that barely existed
02:21and then spending disproportionate amounts of resources solving it
02:25in the faint hope that two or three really attentive players might notice and appreciate it?
02:30Maybe you don't play Hollywood Animal for its incredibly detailed movie-making system,
02:35the golden age of Hollywood atmosphere, the employee management, plus a thousand funny stories along the way.
02:40But maybe you'll play it because the buildings become slightly distorted in perspective as you move the camera.
02:46It's something to think about!