One of the challenges we faced in Kung Fu Kingdom was deciding what perspective to use when drawing our isometric 2d characters. Our priorities were:
1. Retain enough side-perspective that we avoid having a top down head-with-arms graphic for our characters.
2. Maintain enough top-perspective to allow the character to blend properly with the world, and avoid a clash of perspective with the character being side view and the world being top-down view.
This is a pretty easy challenge, it simply involves some experimenting. This is what John Corbett (Artist) came up with.
Another challenge was finding the right size for the units. Too big and we face the problem of not being able to fit enough units on the screen at any given time. Too big of a scale would also leave the player feeling like they are not getting enough of the strategic picture at any given time – a serious no-no for any strategy game. Too small of a scale and the player would not be able to see all the loving detail and animation that we are planning on putting into our characters. Again, simple testing provides an extraordinary amount of information which helps us make our final decision. More John Corbett stuff.
This was a quick and dirty overview of some of the thought that went into deciding what kind of viewing angle we wanted to go with for our characters and how big we wanted our characters to be in relation to the environment.
Credit: While the character art is all ours, the environment tiles are grabbed from [Lost Garden](http://lostgarden.com/2006/07/more-free-game-graphics.html), which is both a great game design blog, but also has some neat free resources to make prototyping easier.