Saturday 23 May 2009

The Path to a different game space

While looking for material for the module I'm teaching on Game Engineering, I recently came across an indie game called The Path from Tale of Tales. It is a fascinating, thought-provoking, and engaging game for a number of reasons, including beautiful graphics, incredible music and sound effects and a clever 'story'. Much has been said about how it pushes the boundaries of games in several ways, many reviewers take it is a clear proof that games can be art.



There are two things I found particularly interesting in the Path (scientifically speaking): the way in which you interact and the way in which its creators use space in a very innovative way. As a player, you interact with objects in the game by stopping to interact, i.e. by letting go of the keyboard/mouse, while being near an object of interest. This is a very interesting take on implicit interaction.

As the game is loosely based on the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, it is somehow part of the story that the player gets lost in the forest. The way this is achieved is by a clever speed-dependent camera control: when you start to run it zooms out in such a way that you look at the character from a bird's perspective. The key thing is that you can't see the horizon anymore, so it is very difficult to know where you are going, and occasionally, the character ever so slightly strays off the direction set by the user, e.g. when avoiding trees. In addition, parts of the world are no longer visible if you move at high speed. The world also changes (partially) depending on which character you play and where you are with respect to the path. Occasionally, you can only reach the safety of the path by standing still and waiting for someone to take you there. There is a map but it only appears briefly after you have moved a considerable distance and it only shows your past trajectory and not the sites of interest. Taken together, these concepts result in a game space that is designed so that you loose your way, pretty much regardless of how systematic you go about exploring it, which is not only a quite innovative approach to space in games but also an integral part of the 'story'.