A History of Pseudo-3D Games – Using 2D Animation With 3D Gameplay (as of 2018)

In 2014, “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” was released, and was hailed as a revolutionary title for being the first successful case of utilizing 2D animation in a fully 3D game.

… well, not really. It’s been quickly overlooked. But years later, I took some time to look up the idea to see if any other games were using a similar visual concept. Over 7,000 games were released on Steam in 2017 alone, by now there are tens of thousands of indie games across Steam and itch.io to choose from: surely, not all of them are using sub-par 3D models or 2D pixel art?

I’m surprised I haven’t really written a more formal article like this before. It should act as a good resource of existing games (both past commercial and more recent indie titles) that tackle the animation concept. I won’t be including purely 2D games that use 2D animation: while there are several excellent examples (2017’s “Cuphead” and 2018’s “Gris” come to mind), high-quality animation in these genres have existed for over a decade now, with far too many to count. We’re looking at “pseudo-3D” here, from over 30 years of history.

Latest Screenshot for “Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament”

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Cool Industry Developments for Real-Time 3D Rendering and Animation

By chance, I stumbled across two different new toolsets (one for Unity3D, one for Blender3D) that could really change the game for animators. One is a Unity3D package called “Scene Track: The Game Media Exporter” (made by E*D Films in Montreal), and the other is a in-development Blender feature called “Eevee.” I encourage you to click on the two links or Google the project names for videos and screenshots to understand what they are, but I’ll discuss them a little more in this blog post.

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Augmented Reality is Becoming Slowly Relevant

AR (Augmented Reality) has been experimented with for almost a decade. I recall in 2013 working over the summer at a app-development company that was playing with the idea of using smartphone cameras to overlay an animated character overtop a QR-code trading card. We’ve seen games like “Pokémon Go” in 2016 giving us cute little monsters seemingly in the same space as us. The applications have been simple so far, relying on simple overlay of CGI, but I suspect we will see greater innovation and growth in this field in the next 3-5 years. This is because both Apple and Google are starting to heavily promote the applications.

Apple and Google used AR to excite audiences for their new devices in Fall 2017

Apple and Google used AR to excite audiences for their new devices in Fall 2017

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E3 2017 : An Indie Developer’s Review

I’ve talked about E3 every year since this site started, and I wonder if I should stop the tradition. It’s fun to talk about the new announcements, but I can’t help but feel that I repeat myself, and that it’s just adding to the thousands of other opinions that came out this week (never mind that this article is a few days after everything is over). That being said, I have something to say about how indie games were represented this year.

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GDC Talks – The Latest in Game Development Animation

There are a handful of conferences that talk about the research and innovation behind the game industry. Unlike other professional subjects, there are virtually no published works like other subjects in Mathematics or Computer Science, but there are still talks and presentations to attend.

One of the biggest conferences is GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) in the USA. And I just discovered via friendly reddit commenters that they have a YouTube channel with many of their talks uploaded for free, including some very specific animation talks that I was excited to watch.

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