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2d: Screens vs. Continuous Scrolling

Started by February 22, 2009 10:17 AM
9 comments, last by Cpt Mothballs 15 years, 11 months ago
I've been doing some 2d game development and was thinking about the old school use of "screens" or "boards" where your avatar appears on one edge and moves over a background that doesn't scroll until he hits some point and a new "screen" or "board" loads. I'm thinking about this either for side scrollers and for isometric games where the main objective is to collect and explore. If you want to make the player feel like they're covering a lot of ground and the world is very large, which do you think would be more effective, scrolling the background or use of screens? I get the feeling that if the view is locked to your avatar it's much harder to appreciate how much territory you've covered. But that could be my nostalgia addled brain. [smile] Any thoughts? Preferences?
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You could go half-and-half, sort of like Metroid. Entering a new room pans the camera all the way to the edge, and then movement within that room can potentially span multiple screens, with smooth scrolling between them.
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Depends.
The basic concept in the NES Legend of Zelda game was each screen basicly boiled down to being a single "room".

Games like Metroid took the same idea and added scrolling so the "rooms" could be larger than a single screen. I still think of these as "rooms" rather than "levels" because of the interconnectivity and ability to revisit them during a game. "Levels" always seemed to me to be one way/one time affairs. You go through them once in a game and don't usualy revisit them...Example: Tomb Raider, Gunstar Heros, etc.

To me the games with "rooms" (single screen or scrolling kind) There should be a purpose (or purposes) to each room. There should be something to interact with. I don't mean that the exact same monsters and obsticals need to respawn everytime the player revisits a "room". Maybe a "room" contains a boss that players must defeat. Players revisiting that "room" may find the corpse of the boss being picked over by buzzards. These birds won't attack the player, in fact they will try to flee if approched. If the player were to kill a buzzard they might be able to fully restore thier drained health. Or the player might revisit the "room" just for the connection it has to other "rooms" and so they may ignore the buzzards.

Also keeping "rooms" screen size can kinda make the game feel a little clastrophobic. It can also be difficult to "see the big picture", like reading a book a paragraph at a time with little scrolly transitions between passages. You might have a game with 1,000 of these "rooms", at a bare minimum thats 999 times the player will get disconnected from the game for some scrolly transition... I'd think you would want to minimize that.

I would go the half and half approch. Some "rooms" could be a single screen in size, others larger. Kinda how SNES The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past did it.
One thing to consider is, if there are any puzzles, they should be in closed in each "screen".

Also, I think the difference between getting to the edge of the screen and then it moving and it loading a new screen is largely superficial. I would use sliding when the character is not going through a door, just walking along a corridor, for example.
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If you are making the choice for game design rather than technical reasons, then I would favour individual room zones if you want to compartimentalise them into separate challenges, but prefer a continuous scrolling world if you want to emphasise a, well, whole complete continuous world. In other words, if your game is about individual puzzles, challenges, or some other divergent themes where each room is separate from each other, it makes sense to design the game graphics that way. However, if you want to emphasise a huge open sprawling world, having a seamless continously scrolling game world will help underline that.
Quote:
Original post by Wavinator
I get the feeling that if the view is locked to your avatar it's much harder to appreciate how much territory you've covered. But that could be my nostalgia addled brain.

Indeed, I think games that use shifting room-based transitions rather than continuous scrolling transitions make their players focus more of their attention on the environment (and what changes are being made to the environment) rather than on their character. It's a lot easier to keep track of something that isn't moving or stays stationary relative to the screen (such as interfaces for instance).

From an artistic standpoint, dividing the world into shifting rooms could probably make each of their styles/themes/differences immediately stand out more from each other, as you won't have the in-between gradual transitions from zone to zone as it were if they were all connected by a continuous scrolling perspective.

But as to which would be better suited for a game with lots of exploration upon a huge world, I'd say both could be; its more of a stylistic thing (and technical) in my opinion.
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I ended up doing mostly divided screens for all the reasons already
mentioned plus some more:

o divided screens don't need to have physically fitting sizes, so
o rooms with more to do can be bigger
o you could travel in a large area under O(log(n))
o you don't have stretch of land with nothing to do
o you could zone into a room with a surprise
o it is easier to obfuscate the path to a destination

Divided zones could have a property where you may not be able to
map all the zones nicely on a map or a minimap.
Quote:
Original post by thk123
One thing to consider is, if there are any puzzles, they should be in closed in each "screen".

Also, I think the difference between getting to the edge of the screen and then it moving and it loading a new screen is largely superficial. I would use sliding when the character is not going through a door, just walking along a corridor, for example.


For the OP's concern, "you want to make the player feel like they're covering a lot of ground and the world is very large", the type of scrolling is less important than the amount of movement.
If the character advances cautiously and linearly and/or stops for a significant time in the same place the environment is likely to appear smaller than if the character moves fast, goes back and forward (e.g. because of key/lock "puzzles"), and is likely to stray from the main path to explore.
For example, running and jumping with the right timing in Super Mario Bros. feels very different from stopping and backpedaling to fight in Ghosts'n'Goblins.

Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru

Quote:
Original post by Wavinator
I've been doing some 2d game development and was thinking about the old school use of "screens" or "boards" where your avatar appears on one edge and moves over a background that doesn't scroll until he hits some point and a new "screen" or "board" loads. I'm thinking about this either for side scrollers and for isometric games where the main objective is to collect and explore.

If you want to make the player feel like they're covering a lot of ground and the world is very large, which do you think would be more effective, scrolling the background or use of screens?
When this is the goal, I'd definitely go with scrolling the background. The faster separate screens flash by (= larger world), the more jarring.

Screens are OK separating distinct challenges and settings, like going from room to room in a house where some rooms contain enemies, some contain puzzles, etc. You can change settings and graphics drastically without having to worry about transitions. This allows traditional adventure games and fixed-camera horror games to present much more dramatic views and spaces one after another than you could manage in continous space, without any dilution or harm to the suspension of disbelief from transitions.

An interesting dimension of this is that it falls on the player to imagine the screen-to-screen transition and fill in any gaps. You don't notice this often with games but both the price and the potential are there, just like in movies. In comics the transitions are much more prominent.

Old-school players are familiar with some idioms related to screens, such that some elements reset between leaving and returning to a screen, or that enemies and moving objects cannot travel across screens, which you might conceivably want to use depending on the game.

You can always use individual screens in the midst of a free-scrolling game for emphasis. Some houses/rooms you can enter in RPGs and platformers are one screen, possibly to emphasize the cramped space and make the bulk of the level feel that much larger and more open when you return into it. Many a free-scrolling game takes either freezes you into a screen or takes control of the scrolling (sometimes with a physical justification, sometimes not) until a boss battle or special event is over. Sometimes, like on the cloud levels of SMB3, the screen *is* the enemy.

[Edited by - Stroppy Katamari on February 24, 2009 7:42:21 AM]
The metroid style screens (And all zeldas but the first; even the 3d ones) are usually called 'flick screening'.

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