Man, just when I thought I had a handle on scope.
A friend of mine brought up something interesting this evening. We looked at some footage of Soulcaster, and he remarked that he thinks things would be improved if we took the characters off the grid. (The grid here means the tile-based movement, a la Final Fantasy VI, which all monsters and the player adhere to.)
In the last couple hours I’ve been mulling the idea over, and have a few pros and cons I’m weighing.
Advantages to Pixel-Based Movement
- Improved game feel. Moving around just feels nicer when you can move at diagonals and not commit to entire tile steps at a time.
- More variety in enemy sizes. Small enemies like bats could form tight clumps, but larger enemies could take up more space. Super large enemies might not even be able to fit through a single tile gap.
- Aesthetics of swarms of enemies moving fluidly would be nicer than jittering along on four-way movement.
Costs of Moving off the Grid
- Time to prototype–probably two days to see how it feels with the main character, and a week to extend it to all monsters in a rudimentary way
- Pathfinding becomes a bit more complex, but it can probably use the current system (cardinal direction-only movement) without looking too bad.
- Two extra perspectives need to be drawn for each creature, for diagonal movement.
- Summons need to stay aligned to the grid, so linking the summoner up with a grid position would need to feel natural. This was a challenge I faced in Escape Goat 2 with the Tiny Hammer, which took the mouse (pixel based movement) and had to find the closest grid position where the block would spawn. I think it turned out pretty well, but I won’t know until I try in Soulcaster whether it needs some extra reticle to show where the summon is about to be placed…
A lot of the code in Soulcaster is based around four-directional movement (the Directions enum is used all over the place). Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at the code and see what would be required to test this out. I’m not committing to it yet, but it’s worth thinking about…