The solution ends up being simple: GrimGrimoire decides that some units ignore collision with terrain, and they either fly or, if they are as massive as the Chimera and Dragon, physically grip the structure of the level and pull themselves through the repeating halls and staircases. So it turns out these are all binary states and can be indicated with totally different metaphors. The coat of paint is “this unit is flying” but what the glittering perfect core code really says is“this unit ignores collision with units and terrain” and also “this unit can only attack and be attacked by certain units” (because it is common to say that some units can’t attack things that fly or do extra damage to them or something). It is not important because there are no degrees of depth in an isometric game. And here is the biggest secret: 3d isometric is no more 3d than a sheet of paper, and none of that depth is actually important. But depth is actually not all that important mainly, it lets you tell which units are hovering above the ground and flying and which are walking on the ground. It might seem weird or impossible to exactly recreate that game in a perspective that cannot even convey the illusion of depth. GrimGrimoire is 2D sprites displayed in profile which is a pretty big leap from the 3d isometric perspective that most RTS games in the footsteps of Those Games By Blizzard With Craft In The Title. GrimGrimoire doesn’t ever let looking like a 16th century painting stop it from being really good at being an RTS but it takes some amazing design choices in order to be both at once. It can just be the Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings of the Tower of Babel of video games. A lesson might be: if a game succeeds in making us care so much about its metaphor we start not caring why it exists, it will probably be fine if we just let it exist. There will be no answers to questions about elegance in design or formalist theory here. It can’t and won’t and doesn’t offer any sort of explanation of why it is trying to be good at both or how much that matters or anything. The game cares about both and is really super good at both. GrimGrimoire is a RTS with a Harry Potter aesthetic that is as invested in being a good RTS as it is in being heartbreakingly storybook beautiful. And no matter how clever your questions about the premise for its existence might be, the game will not disappear in a puff of logical paradox. But it’s also important to consider: the game kind of already exists. It is a fair and okay question to ask, why this particular coat of paint, why a coat of paint at all, why do we need these metaphors to get to the game and what is the best metaphor for thinking about a game, in the way that abstract useless questions sometimes lead to something very interesting. GrimGrimoire: an RTS about a young witch at the Might As Well Be Harry Potter School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which, while it does not have the strangest paint an RTS has ever had, cares more about its paint, and is more worth caring about, than pretty much any other game like it. There are some popular games with the word ‘craft’ in their titles that care a lot about themselves but have not done so great at getting me to care too, so I will talk about the game that did. Because when I frame it as “the coat of paint could be different” the underlying message changes to “the coat of paint doesn’t matter.” It can be easy to agree that the paint does not matter when so many games treat the coat of paint as if it does not matter, or as if it was just a coat of paint and not a painting, or if the coat of paint was not as or more important a thing than the game under it. This is kind of true, and like a lot of things that are kind of true, it is a lot wrong. The paint is important because it is very difficult for anyone to look directly at the glittering perfect code core. Video games are a glittering perfect code core painted over with Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons or Herbert and Warhammer 40k or whatever is currently popular in the office or the target demographic. You can paint over it-the hitboxes, the upgrade paths, the resource economics-with anything.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |