u/SideMV

I think it explains what I'm building better than simply calling it a “2.5D engine”.

This is not 3D! You can use pixel art, hand-drawn assets, sprites, props, illustrations, whatever you want.

You can freely position those 2d assets in the scene, change their scale and rotation, move them in depth, and use perspective to make the whole thing feel more like a space than a traditional tilemap.

And you can do a lot of this directly from the "Side Editor" while playtesting: move and transform assets, set collisions, adjust the camera, connect things to events, and more.

That's really the workflow I'm after.

Instead of constantly stopping the game, changing things, and checking again, you can look at the scene and just build it.

That's also the main difference from something like MV3D. Technically, it’s pretty simple: the assets are still 2D Pixi sprites, but the Engine uses their depth to control their position, scale and layering. So you get the feeling of a 3D space while everything is still made with 2D assets.

That's what I mean by “gridfree doodads in 2.5D” ;)

I wanted to make 2.5D games in RPG Maker MV, so I built the tool I couldn't find.

This is SideMV Engine, a work-in-progress 2.5D toolkit for RPG Maker MV.

The idea is to let you build and edit your 2.5D scenes directly while playtesting: place assets, adjust their position, scale and rotation, and see the result immediately through the camera.

It's still in development, but the core workflow is finally starting to feel right. I'm planning to release the first public version as Early Access soon.

You can find me on Itch as SideMV, follow me of you don't want to miss the release ;)