Alright, so I’m working on my tower defense game, and it’s coming on nicely. However, instead of just viewing if strictly top down, how do I go about making it so that turrets can be viewed from a “3d” ish point of view? That’s to say, when they rotate they actually show another side of them?
is what I have now, and as you can see, the towers just rotate, but they look very flat and not 3d’ish at all.
Cheers! 
There are multiple ways of doing 3D graphics. You could go for an isometric view or just an angled (Pokemon style) 2D view. You could also go for real 3D, but then you’d need 3D models and textures. A super simple way of adding depth might be to just add shadows to the towers as they are now.
I’d like to stay out of 3d, until I am more at home with making 2d games.
Something like Pokémons style would be nice, but I’m not sure how to make the towers when they rotate, since they can rotate all 360 degrees and not just the 4 corners.
I thought about adding shadows, and I think I’ll be adding that to my todo list!
Warning: once you breathe 2D games, you don’t want to do anything else anymore 
The problems to overcome are just so simple yet there is still a vast pool of creativity to unleash that way. Who needs 3D anyway?
Haha, well, if I can get my kicks out of making 2d games, then there really isn’t much need for going to 3d. But knowing me, then I’ll eventually want to see if I can make a 3d game.
But that wont happen until I’ve actually made some nice(that is, games that I enjoy looking at/playing myself) 2d games
I really like making 3d graphics but gameplay is usually better served with purely 2d at least for mobile games or smaller indie game devs.
It’s lots easier to make 3d graphics scale and add lot of variety even with really small number of assets. You can easily just tint them, change material, textures, rotate, animate differently or something. Heck you can do beatiful stuff just using simple shapes and some shader magic.
Making good looking sprites is time consuming and expensive and its really hard to reuse those without making everything look same and boring. It’s lot harder to make any variety and tiling is allways a problem. Animating is also lot more work with sprites.
I’d go 3D isomorphic, mechanical models are not difficult, it’s the organics that make me cringe. But the important thing is to do what you’re comfortable with, it’s your game after all.
Right now I just want to figure out how I can show my towers from an angle, instead of pure top-down, while being able to rotate them 360 degrees and show each side of them.
For a little better explanation of what I want, check http://www.penguinsattack.com. That’s how I want to be able to show towers.
The ones used in most 2D games like that are sprite sheets, each angle has it’s own sprite set, it’s a lot of work without using either a raytracing/modeling program like Blender, or just using actual 3D in game. It looks like that particular game used 8 angles, that means 8 different sprite sets per object. There are ways to simplify it, like make 4 then flip them horizontally, but then you would not be able to use shadows on the sprite.
Oh, and the type of imaging is called 3D orthographic, if you are going to render with a program that you can model in 3D with, that’s the type of camera to use.
Just like in Starcraft 1 sprites like these are pre-rendered from a lot of different angles/rotations of the model and then saved to a spritesheet, which the game loads
doesnt have to be a 3d model per se if you dont have the skills (although a tower like this is really simple, you dont need much detail), these sprites can also be just handdrawn in photoshop or whatever
Oh, hm. Didn’t occour to me that it could just be a bunch of sprites that was used. Silly me.
And yay, “3D orthographic” is something that can be googled. Better than “2d fake 3d,” “2.5d,” etc. etc. 
What programs is out there, that’s free, that can be used to make models for stuff like this? (And if not free, then at least not too expensive, I’m but a poor student :P)
I recommend Blender, but you’ll have to get use to the interface, it’s not very user friendly. The program though has a default renderer that will make great game sprites. It also has built in shaders for toon if you want that. It’s a robust program, completely free, and who knows, you may wind up liking it so much you’ll make a full 3D version of your game.
Well, I’ll give it a swirl. Looks like they have tutorials and all sorts of goodies.
So we’ll see how I fare in the world of making models and stuff.
Thanks for the help guys! 
Tons, Blender community is pretty massive. You can also ask me for help, I know a few tricks not in the tutorials for some things. I’m actually developing scripts for exporting to my new game library, another huge benefit.
I’ll keep that in mind! Though I’ll start with figuring out how to make a turret with Blender, before running for more help.