CONTEXT - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 100

tiles—the texture on the wall of the room the player is in, or a mountain in the distance. In
many cases, the artist has drawn the tiles in such a way to distinguish foreground images from
background. Foreground tiles are bold with solid black outlines, while background tiles use
more muted colors, are partially transparent, or have softer outlines (see Figure 4.24 ).

Figure 4.24 Comparing foreground and background tiles in Knytt Stories .

A common problem found in games made with Knytt Stories is background tiles being repur-

posed as foreground tiles, as things for Juni to climb on and over. With their muted colors and
soft borders, they don't stand out from the background, so the player doesn't always read them
as solid, climbable objects. In one particular Knytt Story, I was unable to proceed in a game
because a scene required climbing up what I misread as a piece of background scenery. I ran
back and searched the entire game world another time, certain that the screen was the back
entrance of a one-way passage: you could jump down from the top of the cliff, obviously, but

there seemed to be no way to climb up.

Here's another communication problem many authors invent different solutions for: Juni can
climb on any surface, so long as she possesses the climbing ability. (The author can give it to
her or take it from her at any game transition.) Often it's untenable to allow the player to scale
any surface to the very top—it's significantly more work to make lots of extra scenes above the
current, for the event that the player chooses to climb up there, and it makes it much harder to
constrain the player's movement, to build a path for her, if she can just climb up and over

any wall.

The obvious solution is to make each wall meet a ceiling, but it's boring to have each area
capped by an artificial ceiling, and it's inconvenient in the case of many scenes. If we want the
player to experience this as an outdoor area, how will that come across when there's a ceiling?

The bank of objects in the Knytt Stories editor offers another solution: “no climb” blocks that

can be placed over any existing game block, which prevent Juni from scaling that block's sides.
These blocks are visible in the editor but invisible to the player (see Figure ), meaning that

the wall beneath the block can look like anything the author wants. It can look like the rest of
the wall, for example.

4.25