Say goodbye to expansive vistas and hillscapes and deep mines. At which size, due to memory constraints, the world would be a quarter the size in each dimension as well. Of course, that still leaves the walls, and even 50cm is still very thick for a wall, so really, the block size would have to be maybe 25cm. Imagine a Minecraft where all the blocks were 1x1x0.5 metres.
Notch once wrote that he considers the addition of half-height blocks and stairs an ugly hack, and that it might have been better to make the blocks half as tall. Minecraft's block size means that its buildings have absurdly thick walls, and it's far harder to make something small and cosy than something massive and imposing. Role-playing games and block-building games like Minecraft often use grids at the scale of about one metre, because that's a convenient size where one person fits onto one tile.īut this still causes problems with representing things at the right size. So what kind of game plays out at the scale of individual houses, small fields, patches of forest? It could be an interesting scale between the personal and the impersonal. The granularity of a game map heavily influences what it's about. Starting at a 10+ metre scale, the size of a house, I think there is unexplored territory in game design. But seeing the same 5x5 piece of land with three shrubs over and over again? You'd end up having to make a lot of different tile types - which is indeed what Brigador does. Large tiles represent generic enough ideas that it doesn't matter. Small tiles can be composed to build up different things. The scale is detailed enough that repetition is obvious. You'd need to include corridors inside tiles that also contain small rooms, in various different arrangements. How do you represent a corridor? As an entire tile? 5 metres is far too wide.
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With large enough tiles, each tile is a whole entity: a building, a town, a district, a solar system.Īt say 5 metres, each tile is a room or a patch of ground. A building is composed of floor tiles, furniture, wall segments, doors. You can build up the map from repeated parts. With small enough tiles, each tile is a piece of furniture, a segment of wall, something human-sized. Brigador's are maybe 5 metres, which makes them quite unusual - and impractical.Īs always with Brigador screenshots, I've brightened the picture so you can see what's going on. SimCity's tiles are the size of a mid-size building, maybe 30 metres. Games with intermediate grid sizes are fairly rare. A mountain next to a swamp? A jungle next to a desert? Sure. They're big and self-contained enough that any combination seems plausible.
Nor do you have to worry too much about whether two tiles can be sensibly placed next to each other. If your tile is a lightyear across, any number of spaceships fit with space to spare. You also don't have to worry about whether a unit can fit through a given space, or even how many units can fit through at once. There is no point in adding detail that does not matter to the game experience you want to provide. Unit movement speeds of 1-3 tiles per turn are easier to think about than ones of 40. Making your tiles as large as possible has the advantage of simplifying the information available to the player. Civilization's tiles can cover thousands of square kilometres because a city tile has a lot of internal detail. At this size, there is usually a large amount of extra information associated at least with some tiles. The very largest map tiles can represent hundreds of kilometres, or even thousands of lightyears. Strategy games tend to use very large grids. By scale I mean how much real-world space each tile represents, not its size on the screen.