FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Other 2D Display Options
This section lists a few approaches to 2D displays that are now seldom used in large commercial games on PCs and consoles but still widely found in web-based games and on smaller devices. Modern games that intentionally opt for a retro feel, such as Alien Hominid and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, also use 2D approaches.
■ Single-screen. The display shows the entire world on one screen, normally from a top-down perspective with cheated objects. The camera never moves. Robotron: 2084 provides a classic example. (See the left side of Figure 13.1.)
■ Side-scrolling. The world of a side-scroller—familiar from an entire generation of games—consists of a long 2D strip in which the avatar moves forward and backward, with a limited ability to move up and down. The player sees the game world from the side as the camera tracks the avatar.
■ Top-scrolling. In this variant of the top-down perspective, the landscape scrolls beneath the avatar (often a flying vehicle), sometimes at a fixed rate that the player cannot change. This forces the player to continually face new challenges as they appear at the top of the screen.
■ Painted backgrounds. Many graphical adventure games display the game world in a series of 2D painted backgrounds rather like a stage set. The avatar and other
characters appear in front of the backgrounds. The artists can paint these backgrounds from a variety of viewpoints, making such games more visually interesting than side-scrolling and top-scrolling games, constrained only by the fact that the same avatar graphics and animations have to look right in all of them. Some use a 2D/3D combination model in which the background is 2D but the character animations are rendered with a 3D engine in front of the background. (See Figure 19.2 for an example.)
