December 28th, 2007
Maps are base for every game. FPS, RPG and platformers have levels. Racing games have tracks. Adventures have rooms. Strategy and simulation games have maps.
I’m especially interested in terrain for strategy and god games. There is something fascinating in creating a region or whole world as a base for a game. When a game presents me an empty terrain it just begs me to start developing it and fill it with paths, roads, fields and houses. Some of the games that are representing this concept are Civilization, Railroad and Transport tycoon, Sim city and Caesar. They differ mainly at scope. Civilization is played on the whole world. Railroad and Transport tycoon’s terrain is some region and Sim city and Caesar are focused on building only one city. Common point is a starting, empty map.
2D grid
All began with simple colored two dimensional grid. Games like Civilization, Sim City and Railroad Tycoon allowed us to cover the terrain from an empty wasteland or few scattered villages to the metropolis.
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| Civilization | Sim city |
Isometric view
Almost all strategy and god games in 90’s were isometric games. Isometric view combines depth of 3D view with precision of 2D view. I kinda have a nostalgia for this technique, most beautiful and playable games I know are isometric games. Sim City 2000, Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Transport Tycoon, X-COM, Age of Empires are all presented in isometric view.
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| Sim city 2000 | Civilization 2 |
3D view
After 3D graphics conquered the world of FPS, every later game was made in 3D. I was very disappointed. With third dimension came camera controls and good deal of time is spent fiddling with the camera. Also, 3D technology is developed and optimized with FPS in mind where player can only see terrain from close. Strategy god like views are complete opposite – they require view from above and cover big terrain. Texture mipmaping instead of sprites caused blurred picture from distance instead of pixel to pixel precision. All screenshots for these games looked nice but when you actually need to move around such terrain it can be frustrating. Largest problem with transition to 3D is that detail are hard to spot when your view is blurred.
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| Caesar 4 | Civilization IV |
2.5D
There’s only one game i know which applied 2.5D view: Sim City 4. This looks to me like sweet point between depth and beauty of 3D view and precision of isometric view. Game is actually 3D but has fixed view angles and zoom levels. This eliminates the need for camera handling and enable the artist to draw detailed textures in fixed sizes.
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| Sim City 4 | Sim City 4 |