Posts Tagged side
What made those old, 2D platformers so great?
Posted by The Management in design on May 13, 2009
A little while ago I dug into Scary Girl for not being a very fun game. This brought up some discussion about what actually makes a good 2D platformer, so I decided to expand on the topic. Below is a list of what I see as three common aspects of many classic platforming titles. These point are not the only things that made those games great, but they’re a shared base that appears again and again.
A layman’s guide to projection in videogames.
Posted by The Management in art on April 11, 2009
Oftentimes when a videogame has a skewed, overhead point of view, we call it isometric. That’s rarely the accurate term, though, and it’s not just pointless semantics.
Although Echochrome uses a single projection type, its gameplay is based on constantly rotating and morphing its 3D structures. With each new view, the physical architecture of the level changes to reflect what the player sees on the screen.
Projection basically means taking a three dimensional object and displaying it on a 2D plane (i.e., a screen). There are various ways of accomplishing this, and each technique has a deep impact on a game’s look and mechanics. The advent of 3D games and free-floating cameras somewhat lessened this role, but being aware of the pros and cons of each projection type is still applicable to both 2D and 3D titles.
So what exactly are these projection types? Well, let’s take a look:
About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I work as a videogame design consultant. I'm also the creative lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and write a lot of it down too, so I figured why not make it public?
If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line at themanagement@significant-bits.com.