On Apr 30, 2005, at 11:46 AM, Lars Jensen wrote:
I agree that in a turn-taking game it's less of an issue. However, for
this
game, I think the presence of "Mission Control"-style information
layers
could significantly detract from the atmospherics -- just like the
hit/movement point displays. I would challenge you to address this in
a more
game-appropriate way than by just throwing displays at it...you're not
a
cyborg or a NORAD employee, you're a guy in a field with a pitchfork!
Okay, you make good points. Zombies works great as a board game, and as
such you want to be able to do things similar to how you'd approach
many board games -- by being able to get up and walk around the darn
thing.
On the other hand, if the purpose of this is just to provide an
extended RB
code example, then maybe all that doesn't matter.
That's also part of the equation -- showing what RB can do!
It is of course a designer's perogative to limit how sketchy the view
is
allowed to get. I just don't want designers to let themselves off the
hook
too easily. "World too big? Oh, just add some fog, make some walls, or
point
the camera down, problem solved." Sure, if you like being in fog,
indoors,
or looking at the ground all the time...I like a little elbow room
myself.
For zooming, the trick to me is determining at what point does the game
start to slow down too much as more and more objects appear on screen.
I feel that designers "let themselves off the hook" mostly because the
game has to adhere to hardware limits and be finished within a certain
timeframe.
While this might sound strange talking about frame rates for a non-RTS
game, there are things slated for Zombies where this can become an
issue. Hopefully Zombies will still be able to cater to those who like
stepping back!
==
Jeff Quan
jquan at mindspring dot com
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode:
<http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/>
Search the archives of this list here:
<http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
|