So here is a sketch of a new kind of level I had the idea of making for a while and finally got to tackling. I was kinda intimidated about using a half 2d , half 3d approach like you see here, but also it seemed like and interesting effect and it opens all sorts of possibilities for different puzzles I could make with these. I though about doing entirely 2d isometric levels, but I liked the idea of being able to move the sprites around and to rotate the entire perspective like you see above. If it's possible to do in 2d at all than it would be a real pain to code and way beyond my skill.
This seems to be more or less working like I wanted it to do, but I had to employ some weird integration nonsense to make this work. For example, you aren't seeing this whole tileset from above the ground ( which would be easier to do if the sprites didn't move vertically), the camera is actually completely flat and looking from a strict birds point of view. I had to do that because otherwise the colliders would intersect whenever I try to move any of the sprites up or down and that just doesn't work at all. Kinda hard to explain what I mean without showing in engine examples, but all the ways I could find of making something like this use some goofy workarounds. Oh well, as long as it works. Hope I don't put myself in the situation where I have to make several versions of the same thing like I did when I had to code three slightly different versions of the same dialog window for different levels because I had no idea what I was doing, haha.
front view
back view
Oh, and this game is called Human Upgrade Labs and a good chunk of it is already fully playable.
Anyway, has anyone tried doing something with 2d sprites in a 3d environment? I know this was quite often used in older games, but I think they mostly used that technique for trees and monsters and such and the rest would be mostly 3d.