Altitude's Genre

[lamsbro]

I sometimes feel Altitude lacks a coherent theme, or artistic direction. What I mean by this is sometimes the game feels like a semi-realistic plane simulation, sometimes it feels like sci-fi, sometimes it feels like micromachines, etc. For example, the biplane and bomber are fairly standard real world planes, they look and fire much like real planes do. On the other hand, explodet and miranda look like they came from Star Wars, or Star Trek, or some other science fiction universe. The turrets also seem to be very sci-fi, whereas the base seems to be in between the realistic and sci-fi genres. Some maps also blur genres, the two official maps, lost city and rolling hills, both seem very much from the semi-realistic genre, but maps like Ant Hill make me feel like I'm playing a micromachines game. Items also cross themes, the homing missile and bomb items are very realistic sorts of items, the shield is a little bit sci-fi-ish and the wall is just goofy.

Maybe you dont think genre mixing is a big deal. I think in the case of Altitude its a fairly minor problem, however I do think its something worth addressing. Imagine for example that in the next Star Trek movie the USS enterprise battles an f16. Would you not find that lame? I kinda feel that same way about a biplane fighting a miranda. I think Altitude could fix this problem by bridging the gap between many of these objects, largely at the artistic level. For example, if the biplane was a little less traditional (I like the idea of biplane 2ndary being a flamethrower), or the miranda looked a little more traditional (not sure how to do that).

What does everyone else think about Altitude's genre mix? Am I off base in thinking miranda and explodet are sci-fi ish? I personally prefer a more consistent semi-realistic genre along the lines of biplane, bomber, base, lost city, rolling hills variety, but I'm also a fan of the shield and wall items. That's not to say I think the game should realisticaly depict actual modern air combat, I just think its better when everything is a little more realisticish.

[argonide]

Originally Posted by lamsbro

I just think its better when everything is a little more realisticish.

I respectfully disagree. Altitude was never about realism. It was about solid fun, addictive and wacky game play. Many parts of altitude will never make any sense "realistically" like the wall, miranda and shield. I think the graphics should have a consistent style(which the anonymous artist has been doing a great job with imo), but I don't think maps need to be limited to "realistic" content. If you've played soldat, you'll notice that all of the maps graphically look like all the other maps, and many of the weapons feel/play similarly to the other weapons. You lose some creative freedom when you limit yourself to things that are realistic. (I don't think that's made up for in marketability either, if you look at the successful independent games, fun game-play almost always take precedence to graphics(n, geometry wars, alien hominid)).

[DiogenesDog]

I basically think that crazier = better. Not only is it good for gameplay (you can do whatever the hell you want and to hell with realism), but I also think it looks a lot nicer from an art perspective. And really, there's no way the gameplay could feel very realistic and still be as much fun, so you're doomed to incongruity or lameness if you go down that route. You'll lose many of the good attacks/powerups, the levels won't be as visually striking, and the planes will be harder to visually differentiate.

Ignoring practical considerations (art $$), here would be my preferences in order from most to least favorite:

1) Complete and total craziness, with every plane being something iconic and the overall mix being slightly silly. No attempt at a visual theme, except to match up the base/turret. So like a biplane, a dragonfly, a flying bus, a spaceship, and a paper plane or something. I mean, these aren't necessarily the best examples, but you get what I mean.

2) A theme that naturally lends itself to some craziness/diversity. For instance, Toy Planes. Package the game as crap from some kid's toybox. And if you really want to go far, go Vi-style and replace all the sound effects with a kid going "ratatatatatat... BOOM!" with their mouth.

3) A theme that's unusual and kind of over the top, but grounded in familiarity/realism. Thinking of something like "during WWI, Earth gets invaded by aliens". So you have an excuse for really wild gameplay effects, but you're locked to a visual theme. This kind of thing could also be kind of cool in the way that Bioshock's tech or steampunk is cool: taking old fashioned technology and pushing it much further than it was meant to go is always kind of neat to me.

4) A plane fighting "cartoon". Basically, what you'd get if there was a Bugs Bunny WWI airplane thing. All the planes are "realistic", but sort of "bouncy" looking. Make all the sound fx very sproingy and silly, etc. This is probably the closest to what it's like now, mainly because of the level art, but you'd want to exaggerate it more on the planes and really tie the sound/UI in.

5) Old school 2D videogame style "realism" that's not actually very realistic at all. Thinking of things like Soldat here.


Oh, and I don't think the Explodet looks sf exactly. It definitely doesn't look like a real world plane, but it looks too old school for me to think of it that way.

And out of curiosity, what's Steve's take on this?

[lamsbro]

1) Complete and total craziness, with every plane being something iconic and the overall mix being slightly silly. No attempt at a visual theme, except to match up the base/turret. So like a biplane, a dragonfly, a flying bus, a spaceship, and a paper plane or something. I mean, these aren't necessarily the best examples, but you get what I mean.

Very early Altitude was kind of like this with Lunar and some other weirdness. It didn't feel right to me.

2) A theme that naturally lends itself to some craziness/diversity. For instance, Toy Planes. Package the game as crap from some kid's toybox. And if you really want to go far, go Vi-style and replace all the sound effects with a kid going "ratatatatatat... BOOM!" with their mouth.

Cute, but probably better suited for a younger target market, the kind whose parents probably don't let them play/buy random online games anyways.

3) A theme that's unusual and kind of over the top, but grounded in familiarity/realism. Thinking of something like "during WWI, Earth gets invaded by aliens". So you have an excuse for really wild gameplay effects, but you're locked to a visual theme. This kind of thing could also be kind of cool in the way that Bioshock's tech or steampunk is cool: taking old fashioned technology and pushing it much further than it was meant to go is always kind of neat to me.

I love this idea, this is my favorite by far.

[DiogenesDog]

re: complete and total craziness for character designs

Originally Posted by lamsbro

Very early Altitude was kind of like this with Lunar and some other weirdness. It didn't feel right to me.

Well, I think that was just because Lunar/Pulsemage sucked fun-wise. On the other hand, the transition from old snoopy -> new loopy definitely leeched some character out of the game imo.

[lamsbro]

I agree the transition from old loopy to new loopy sucked some of the character out of the game, partly I think, because we associate snoopy and woodstock with lots of interesting and cool things (most impoortantly the famous WWI ace, The Red Baron), but also partly because the new loopy is not as distinct (the new loopy plane size is pretty average, whereas the old loopy size was distinctly square-like).

The real question is why was it that Lunar and Pulsemage sucked? I think the reason is because they failed to tap into, and in fact completely contradicted, the aerial combat universe that we find so interesting. There's no room in modern air combat mythology for flying pulse mages, and adding them to the mix just undermines the believability of the whole Altitude universe, making it less meaningful to the player and thus less enjoyable (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief). Its as if a giant Gandalf came flying out of the death star on a broom and started knocking X-wings down with his staff: it turns a fictional universe that we have temporarily agreed to take interest in (suspension of disbelief) into meaningless absurdity.

[Karl]

Originally Posted by lamsbro

I agree the transition from old loopy to new loopy sucked some of the character out of the game, partly I think, because we associate snoopy and woodstock with lots of interesting and cool things (most impoortantly the famous WWI ace, The Red Baron), but also partly because the new loopy is not as distinct (the new loopy plane size is pretty average, whereas the old loopy size was distinctly square-like).

The real question is why was it that Lunar and Pulsemage sucked? I think the reason is because they failed to tap into, and in fact completely contradicted, the aerial combat universe that we find so interesting. There's no room in modern air combat mythology for flying pulse mages, and adding them to the mix just undermines the believability of the whole Altitude universe, making it less meaningful to the player and thus less enjoyable (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief). Its as if a giant Gandalf came flying out of the death star on a broom and started knocking X-wings down with his staff: it turns a fictional universe that we have temporarily agreed to take interest in (suspension of disbelief) into meaningless absurdity.

so what you're saying is mages on a broom are unbelievable but a dog flying around on a dog house is not?

[lamsbro]

No, snoopy suffered from the same genre mismatch, but to a lesser degree because at least snoopy invoked WWI style aerial combat (in Peanuts there are numberous references to snoopy sitting on his dog house pretending to be a WWI era pilot).

I guess I should point out that genre mismatch is not necessarily a bad thing if done well, Mel Brooks uses it to good comedic value in his movies, but a half-assed genre mismatch is neither funny nor engaging.

[Snowsickle]

Biplanes is not, and doesn't seem likely that it will ever be, story based. Therefore suspension of disbelief is a nonexistant element and your comparison to a star wars movie is basically laughable for that reason. I don't honestly believe that most people will have a problem with crazy plane concepts so long as they add something to gameplay and are at least moderately amusing in their craziness.

I wasn't around for the lunar/pulsemage era but I recall hearing that one of them was able to hover in place. If that's true, then it has nothing to do with suspension of disbelief and everything to do with the fact that it completely ignored one of the main aspects of gameplay.

[lamsbro]

By suspension of disbelief I refer to whatever it is that makes us care about what happens in a fictional universe. This does not mean everything has to be realistic, it just has to be consistent. Take the Lord of the Rings for example, if you've ever watched it or read the book you take an actual interest in knowing what happens, you want to know what happens to Frodo, what happens to Gandalf, what happens to Aragorn, etc. There's no reason for us to care unless we assign some value to the happenings of the Middle Earth universe, we temporarily suspend our disbelief in the Middle Earth universe. The same process is in play in games, who cares if you shoot another plane down, or your team owns the other team? So you killed Blank repeatedly, its just an imaginary plane, he didn't really die. But we do care about these things, and that's due to what I refer to as suspension of disbelief.

Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing though, and when contradictory things occur in a fictional universe it causes us to call into question the meaningfulness of the universe, weakening that suspension of disbelief and our interest in what happens.

[argonide]

I still think this is a non-issue. Altitude's genre is an arcade game. Games don't need to make sense to be fun. Look at super mario brothers 3 for example. What exactly was the theme of that game? Were you less interested in the game when you became a raccoon and were able to fly? Looking back on it that game made absolutely no sense, it was a completely fictional universe with random powerups/enemies/levels where you could see they added things in not because it made sense thematically but because it was fun. That was a single player game too, where traditionally people think the story "matters more".

[Ferret]

There's one way to make sure you produce the best game themes and characters like they came up with in the 70's and 80's.

Fire on the mountain Lams.

Originally Posted by lamsbro

Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing though, and when contradictory things occur in a fictional universe it causes us to call into question the meaningfulness of the universe, weakening that suspension of disbelief and our interest in what happens.

**** it sounds like your brother has already been there but on some bad stuff.

[lamsbro]

Argonide, you make a good point, but I think what made Mario work was that it was very consistent in not making sense. Raccoons don't actually fly, plumbers don't really travel through pipes, you can't really hop on turtles or bullets (at least in the way you do in Mario), mushrooms don't really make you grow bigger (or give you extra lives), flowers don't really let you throw fireballs, no turtle's have wings, punching bricks doesn't cause them to explode, etc. No doubt the Mario games are weird as ****, but its very consistent in weirdness.

I also agree that it should be all about fun, my point is, what causes some things to be fun? I think some sort of suspension of disbelief is involved.

[DiogenesDog]

I think suspension of disbelief just isn't quite the right term. It's not like you have to buy into it really on emotional or intellectual level, it's mostly an aesthetic thing. So while it doesn't have to make logical sense, it does have to have a certain aesthetic sense to it where everything fits together. imo it's more of an art direction issue than a storytelling/world-building type thing.

and for that reason, I think it would be horribly inappropriate to add, say, a giant bumblebee at this point. but if the game already had a bunch of crazy random ****, it'd make a lot more sense. in fact, I think the miranda actually feels more jarring now than loopy did in the past... back then, having both loopy AND the miranda made it so I just accepted that there was random crazy stuff in the game, so it wasn't as noticable. now with just the miranda being the odd man out, it feels a little more wtf. especially since the art style went from this south park type crude programmer art to the more polished stuff that's in the game now. because things look more "real", there's a part of me that expects them to make more sense as well.

all that said, I think it's fine the way it is. I'd be bothered if the game had a story or something, but right now it's a pretty minor issue imo.