Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
walking through the space, objects need to look right for their surrounding area.
You might want to slightly exaggerate the size of critical objects such as keys, weap -
ons, or ammunition to make them more visible, but most things, such as doors and
furniture, should be scaled normally.
If you're designing a game with an aerial or isometric perspective, you might need
to distort the scale of things somewhat. The real world is so much larger and more
detailed than a game world that it's impossible to represent objects in their true
scale in such a perspective. For example, in modern mechanized warfare, ground
battles can easily take place over a 20-mile front, with weapons that can fire that
far or farther. If you were to map an area this size onto a computer screen, an indi-
vidual soldier or even a tank would be smaller than a single pixel, completely
invisible. Although the display will normally be zoomed in on one small area of
the whole map, the scale of objects will have to be somewhat exaggerated so that
the objects are clearly identifiable on the screen.
Games frequently distort the relative heights of people and the buildings or hills in
their environment. The buildings are often only a little taller than the people who
walk past them. (See
Figure 4.5
for an example.) To be able to see the roofs of all
the buildings or the tops of all the hills, the camera must be positioned above the
highest point in the world. But if the camera is positioned too high, the people are
hardly visible at all. To solve this problem, the game simply does not include tall
buildings or hills and exaggerates the height of the people. Because the vertical
dimension is seldom critical to the gameplay in products such as war games and
role-playing games, it doesn't matter if heights are not accurate, as long as they're
not so inaccurate as to interfere with suspension of disbelief.
Designers often make another scale distortion between indoor and outdoor loca-
tions. When a character walks through a town, simply going from one place to
another, the player wants the character to get there reasonably quickly. The scale of
the town should be small enough that the character takes only a few minutes to get
from one end to another unless the point of the game is to explore a richly detailed
urban environment. When the character steps inside a building, however, and
needs to negotiate doors and furniture, you should expand the scale to show these
additional details. If you use the same animation for a character walking indoors
and outdoors, this will give the impression that the character walks much faster
outdoors than indoors. However, this seldom bothers players—they'd much rather
have the game proceed quickly than have their avatar take hours to get anywhere,
even if that would be more accurate.
This brings up one final distortion, which is also affected by the game's notion of
time (see the section “The Temporal Dimension” later in this chapter), and that is
the relative speeds of moving objects. In the real world, a supersonic jet fighter can
fly more than a hundred times faster than an infantry soldier can walk on the
ground. If you're designing a game that includes both infantry soldiers and jet
fighters, you're going to have a problem. If the scale of the battlefield is suitable for
jets, it will take infantry weeks to walk across; if it's suitable for infantry, a jet could
