Game Worlds - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 87

properties are related to one another, and these groups of related properties are the
dimensions of the game world. To fully define your world and its setting, you need
to consider each of these dimensions and answer certain questions about them.
The Physical Dimension
Video game worlds are almost always implemented as some sort of simulated physi-
cal space. The player moves his avatar in and around this space or manipulates
other pieces or characters in it. The physical properties of this space determine a
great deal about the gameplay.
Even text adventures include a physical dimension. The player moves from one
abstract location, usually called a room even if it's described as outdoors, to another.
Back when more people played text adventures, the boxes the games came in used
to carry proud boasts about the number of rooms in the game. Gamers could take
this as a very rough measure of the size of the world they could explore in the game
and, therefore, the amount of gameplay that the game offered.
The physical dimension of a game is itself characterized by several different proper-
ties: spatial dimensionality, scale, and boundaries.
SPATIAL DIMENSIONALITY
One of the first questions to ask yourself is how many spatial dimensions your
physical space will have. It is essential to understand that the dimensionality of
the game's physical space is not the same as how the game displays that space (the
camera model) or how it implements the space in the software. How to implement
the space and how to display it are separate but related questions. The former has
to do with technical design, and the latter has to do with user interface design.
Ultimately, all spaces must be displayed on the two-dimensional surface of the
monitor screen.
These are the typical dimensionalities found in video games:
■ 2D. A few years ago, the vast majority of games had only two dimensions. This
was especially noticeable in 2D side-scrolling games such as Super Mario Bros. (see
Figure 4.1 ). Mario could run left and right and jump up and down, but he could
not move toward the player (out of the screen) or away from him (into the screen).
Two - dimensional worlds have one huge advantage when you're think ing about
how to display them: The two dimensions of the world directly correspond to the
two dimensions of the monitor screen, so you don't have to worry about conveying
a sense of depth to the player. On the other hand, a number of games with 2D
game worlds still use 3D hardware accelerators for display so that objects appear
three-dimensional even though the gameplay does not use the third dimension.
Two - dimensional worlds may seem rather old-fashioned nowadays, but there are
still many uses for them in casual browser-based games and smaller devices such as
low-end mobile phones.