World scale and size morphing

[KwisatzHaderach]

Alright, you asked for it

I love the play with scale.
I loved it in Psychonauts, when you were Goggalor in Lungfishopolis, I loved driving my match box cars through sand castles and toasters in Micro Machines and I loved the level in Serious Sam 2 where you shoot your way through a backyard with giant cigarette buds and mushrooms.

I would love a RPG or FPS game that focuses on this aspect instead of using it as a gimmick. It would be interesting to morph from the size of a mite into something tree high all within the same environment and be able to do it at will. You could restrict the game world to one small island, a mansion or even a single room and it would still be big enough for hundreds of hours of exploration. I have no clue how that could be implemented, just thinking of UI and physics restrictions but it could offer a very different experience from today's game worlds that always brag with being X times bigger than X's game world. Instead make the area you can explore deeper in scale.

[david]

@Kwisatz... zooming in and out of scale would, for sure, be an interesting and fun mechanic for solving puzzles and exploring: You can bet that there will be a game that will play upon this concept of layers within layers! As you mention though, unless the world is limited in size, the amount of very detailed assets (like characters, buildings, objects, foliage) may become very high... so that the game's environments look 'real enough' and 'interesting enough' at every level of zoom. Because of this, scale almost certainly won't be a thing in GoaT... but you can bet there will be a 'big budget' title (or an indie title with a more limited graphical style than GoaT) or even a game with an environment that is procedurally generated, that will use scale zooming. It sure would be an interesting level design challenge to build an environment that is satisfying in terms of gameplay at a variety of zoom levels... it is a bit zen or meta

At a technical level, I think the Unity game engine systems could probably handle reasonable scale changes (like say from insect to tree size). Physics (and the co-ordinate system) would be the key ones that would need watching, but that degree of scale change should be ok.

Vaguely related: on another thread, Seith has said that there won't be humans in the game, though he hasn't specified whether human-scale objects will feature in the GoaT gameworld.

[evilkinggumby]

I think the idea is kool but I have to agree with David, to pull that off and have it work in a satisfying way would likely require a whole team of dev's in order to have the proper mesh/polygon adjustment and on the fly texture/bump/shadow/real mapping converted from micro to macro realistically. It WOULD be kool, and most games that try and replicate that insect size feel are pretty damn fun. +

[evilkinggumby]

Ok this has nothing to do with GOAT but I think you might be interested in this kickstarter for a game featuring scalability as a core element of the design.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1188957169/scale

only 4 days left though so hopefully you catch this in time. I just saw it due to another kicker I backed.

-EKG

[david]

^ @ EvilKing... exactly! that's the kind of thing I was talking about. 'Scale' looks very interesting, for sure... it could be great! This project game uses a much simpler visual style than GoaT, so zooming in and out is more achievable.

From everything I've seen and heard from Seith so far, GoaT will be very visually detailed, but the scale will stay constant.