Isometric 2D game without tiles. Is there a solution?

Question

Is it possible to create an isometric view of the game without the use of tiles?

I've already searched in stackoverflow.com and gamedev.stackexchange.com, but I could not find a simple solution for isometric maps using Corona SDK.

My goal is to create something like this picture: KRu.jpg

Do you think the game is made with tiles or not? Is using tiles the only solution for this kind of game?

Problems that I do not understand: – Overlapping objects that are farther – Change overlapping sprite when it moves around the map. When an object moves, some of its facilities will be closed, others are not. What is the logic of such a task? – The logic of the movement of objects along a path with no tiles

I do not want to reinvent itself what must have already decided.

If the tiles can not be avoided, I ask once again to leave links to materials that will solve the problem of isometry in the Corona SDK.

Answer 1

These are 100% tiles/sprites or whatever. Noone draws that kind of detail with code.

Also it is not isometric, this is isometric:

The grid in your example seems to be a simple top-down square grid. Here is another example of a 2D top down square grid:

Do you see the difference?

Here is a great tutorial series to creating a game in that style: http://that-guy.net/articles/page3/ Start from page 3 and move through them one by one.

Answer 2

You can develop the game as a 3D game, but have a fixed camera angles and use "upright" sprites. A game that pulls this off is Bastion:

The animations are very smooth and well-done, but they still use sprite sheets.

Answer 3

This can be done in a variety of ways, most requireing use of a 3D engine.

In one of our prototype engines we did it by using a custom 3D engine based on LibGDX that used orthographic projection to get isometric view. Each "tile" was then rendered as a 3D cube with textures, so we had to create content for the textures. The seams required extra love in the form of seam sprites that made the transitions look better. This would not allow us to "rotate" the scene though.

There were no "tiles" in our engine, but it was kind of tile'ish. Other engines might abandon cubes in flavor of arbitrary 3D geometry and models instead. For a game-engine this is a perfectly valid idea. It all boils down to the look you want and the pipeline for content production you want. (and of course the platform you will deploy to).