Otyugra

Hello. As with before, these are the bold consequences of designing a large-scale game with grid movement. Our game, Phantomatics, take the concept of a grid-platformer as laid out by games like Frogger 2 for the Playstation 1 and runs with it. Here's Part one.

Strange Truth #3:

Grid game worlds are easier to design

The self-imposed limits of a rigid grid mean the player has different expectations for a living world within a game. Grids are abstractions of reality, and as such, small movements on a grid can hold so much more meaning. If you see a character wandering around outside their house, perhaps your mind fills in the gaps that the character is doing yard work or looking for something, because who's to say?

This brings to light that using a grid can easily be a way of cutting corners, and I'm willing to own up to doing just that. When you're not a studio with a big budget or pull, coming up with ways to make corner cuts smarter is vital. That being said, simplicity and abstraction have a unique value and unique voice. In that sense, less is more.

Strange Truth #4:

Grids connect the past with the future

Wario Land for the Virtual Boy. A game that uses a grid despite the growing sophistication of the series.

As games have gotten bigger and better, hardware no longer relies on scanlines and rigidly placed rectangle sprites for their presentation, but all the same, grid design has always stuck around in subtle ways. Sure, maybe nowadays nothing conforms to those grids except the ground, but that alone can have a domino effect in which all free form objects must take into account the sublime simplicity of the world they're surrounded by.

The point I want to make is that its usefulness and natural choice for a foundation isn't going away anytime soon, which means grids are as much a part of old game design as it will be new designs. The difference will come elsewhere. Maybe making bigger worlds will become easier with technology, and games of specific sizes become doable with smaller and smaller teams as time passes. As you can see in the virtual boy game featured above, new technology comes into focus all the time, and for Wario Land, the player suddenly could travel not just left, right, up, down, but also back and forth between the foreground and background. Games are getting more sophisticated all the time, but grid thinking continues to be relevant even as games become more realistic or more impressive.

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So there you have it. Using a grid prominently in a big modern game is an alternative way to experience adventure, and comes with development quirks. This says nothing about the unexplored possibilities of putting different genres on a grid (platformers like our Phantomatics are still an anomaly). Time will tell what grids will offer to gaming in the future, and I'm happy to be apart of that.

Check out the page on Phantomatics here!