Introduction to Isometric Movement in Games

Learn how we make characters move in isometric games! We look at both the foundations and the code in Godot. Gumroad shop: ---- In this gamedev tutorial, we look at the most common “isometric“ projection in games. It’s not exactly the same we use for isometric drawing, e.g. in industrial design. You’ll see why we use a 2:1 ratio for the size of our base cells in the video. The function to convert cartesian coordinates to isometric ones takes only 2 lines of code: func cartesian_to_isometric(vector): return Vector2(vector.x - vector.y, (vector.x vector.y) / 2) But it’s not that easy to understand without some visual pointers. When a character moves in one direction in the isometric system, he always moves both on the X and Y axis in the game. That’s where the complexity of isometric games come from: you have to manage the game data as if you were creating a top-down title, and you must then convert all the positions