I've been having problems drawing rooms where you get maximum useful space out of it without scaling the characters up and down. There's always a sweet spot in the middle where everything is hunky dory and then a sort of gray area on the edges of this where you can fudge it but the tops and the bottoms are generally off-limits without scaling the character up or down which I don't really like to do. Any tricks you've learned? What happens to me is that you end up with a lot of rooms that look kinda the same so I'm trying to break up the monotony. Thanks in advance!
I guess that if you want a room where characters don't scale you need to create those rooms without "depth"..?
Flat horizontal 2D or isometric perspective of sorts?
Yeah, that's what I've been running into. The rooms look stagy. I also have a sort of quasi-isometric angle which helps. Really, though, Maybe I should be looking to television sets for inspiration. I mean, in classic TV they used the same, like, three or four sets for 90% of the show and nobody seemed to mind!
I'd look at the backgrounds from Curse of Monkey Island. Guybrush does scale, but it looks a bit crummy, so they've carefully laid out the rooms so that he's at full sized as much as possible.
This is one of the reasons why i personally prefer a side scrolling room design as the character does not have to use scaling, the character remains on one walkable area.
Though this option doesn't give you maximum room usage as everything which is interactable will need to be on or close to the player walkable area.