I had the opportunity to work in a non-UO isometrical environment with a world bulding game that Raph Koster had in beta before he went off to FB games, Playdom and finally Disney. It was an amazing experience in understanding how isometric games are created as a non gaming artist. I'll share this pic of a game I was working on but never was able to finish, to give you an idea. We could upload art to use as objects or textures to use groundcover or in the wall builder, which worked much like our house builder in UO.
The bookcases had player made modules attached to it to make them containers, the avatar has a life bar but the hunting aspect never got past kicking animated rats around. Hand drawing animated things was maddening, but at that time I had no experience with 3D graphics. The bag in the upper left hand corner was a working UO-esk inventory, and I had a simple collection game going, but everytime I updated the game, everyone lost thier inventory. It was never finished, but I still miss it and all the great people I met there. Raph Koster, btw, was an early dev for UO.
