In the Poconos recuperating, escaping a somewhat trapped and confined existence at home. Much easier here.

Sketches of Pain

Spent some time sketching out the stage and characters by hand on some graph paper. Learned that I’m out of practice. Trying to work out the perspective, as there will be multiple problems to deal with there. You can go straight top-down, but you want the characters to be in semi-profile so that will look kinda like they’re all lying down on the stage, which isn’t a thrilling show. Maybe not a huge problem, I mean think about computer chess games – you don’t throw them out the proverbial window because the pieces are technically on their sides. But still a top down view with cartoon-realistic players is gonna look strange I think.

You can alleviate some of that by tilting the board, bringing the camera down. In real life doing that will put the whole stage in perspective – the back will be smaller on screen than the front, etc. That also means that lane 1 is technically narrower than lane 5, the characters will be smaller, and in general everything has to scale down, which adds a layer of translation to certain calculations, which I don’t want to do. I really just want fake 3d here.

So you can just ignore all that and keep everything the same size, which is physically ridiculous but easier to handle and so is much more appealing, and I think is reasonable to the user. Look at Streets of Rage, for example. Or Peacekeeper. As long as the gameplay is fun we can ignore some physical realities. So that’s fine, but I need to work out how that will be done and fit on screen. So I’m looking at reference, sketching out different layouts, etc.

I think it’s probably a bad idea to rotate horizontally, ie so that characters in a vertical line appear diagonally (think Radiant Historia, eg). It lets you pack the characters closer together, and is more exciting, but it messes with user perspective in a bad way in pseudo-action game I think.

So probably the right angle is just a rotation down vertically from the top to something that looks nice. Still trying to find it.

Listened to this interview with DFW while drawing. Earlier listened to his commencement address, which always helps set me straight. Main message: you can choose what to think, what to pay attention to, to be aware, to be compassionate, to not be automatic, and it’s not easy, but you can. Perfect thing to listen to while I’m trying to reset myself in the poconos.