Ok, so here's a weird idea for a graphics concept. There have been lots of 3d games that uses 2d sprites or attempts to integrate the two in some way (like Ragnarok online,) and there have been lots of games that make an effort to make the 3d look "2d-ish" or "toon-y" (like Zelda,) but what I've never seen is a 3d game that tries to directly emulate the specific constraints of 2d sprite graphics... in 3d. In other words, instead of pursuing the eternal goal of 2d, which is to emulate 3d effects, this system is a 3d system that pursues the goal of emulating 2d effects. To accomplish this goal the system follows certain steps: 1. No perspective. Every sprite based 2d game is in orthographic projection (equidistant to camera,) so that's what this system uses as well at it's base. The terrain is displayed close to overhead, created with orthographic compensation in mind (northern edges of cliffs have more prominent slopes than southern edges.) The models existing on the terrain are rotated in world space to be displayed at an angle. This emulates how a sprite in a 2d game is drawn, where perspective is tweaked locally, like how a sprite in a SNES rpg is more at an angle in relation to the camera than it actually should be in an overhead view. The person making the model locks it in at a certain angle by artistic consideration.

There's very little to gain from rolling our own system for user authentication, matchmaking, user-data storage and many more such CRUD tasks. Even if we do eventually need more custom solutions to these problems, we do not yet know what the right custom solution looks like. We might as well start with what Nakama offers until we fully understand what we actually need. I strongly suspect we will find there is not much of this infrastructure we need a custom solution for. To get a good grasp of Nakama's core offering, look no further than these hands-on tutorials: https://heroiclabs.com/blog/announcements/godot-fishgame/ https://defold.com/2021/03/02/Creating-online-games-using-Nakama-and-Defold/