I always wondered how games handled tiling for the snes/gba if the tiles weren't square. Did they have a set for all tiles intersecting with each other? How did they make characters walk/position themselves with the isometric view to make it look "good"? Some games that come to mind are: "tactics ogre - let us cling together", "vantage master", "energy breaker". and many more. Anybody got some thoughts on that?
Well, there is scaling/rotation. There is also the tedious rearranging of each rotation into tiled sprites. On SNES Mode7 effects could also be used for advanced scaling and rotation effects, while on GBA..I don't really know, I haven't researched the console much...
Yes, it's exactly the same as any other game, but isometric playfields will require more corner and edge tiles than the average standard projection game which will have 8/16/32 pixel aligned "metatiles". As for sprites, they will use the same number of tiles as normal since sprites can be positioned anywhere. I'm not sure what you mean about the character movement, they work the same too. The game engine physics will just transpose the regular X velocity into X and Y axes.
