All the pretty colours
Jul. 18th, 2002 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerYesterday I downloaded Tranquility, a mixture of old-school gameplay and intensely pretty swirling graphics.
The gameplay isn't just old-school in that it's very simple, it also harks back to the early days when games could be abstract. When you couldn't possibly simulate in a realistic way, so game designers didn't bother, they went for the more imaginative "anything goes" approach. And that's what Tranquility is - there's no real world anywhere within 50 feet of the game. There's just abstract swirly shapes of different kinds. They move up and down, follow each other in spiral patters, disappear when you're least expecting it and then pop up just when it's least convenient. Oh, and the Spinner, which is somewhere in the midst of the swirling realms of strangeness, waiting for you to thread your way through the shimmering pulsating maze of otherness until you can find it, and be transported to a different shimmering maze.
Yup, that's the other thing that's old-school - there's no real change in levels. I mean, sure, they look different, but looking at a few levels so far, there's no easy way to tell which one's harder than the next (although some of them definitely are). The graphics, however, despite their simplicity (most of the pieces are rectangles, or warped versions thereof) are incredibly pretty. I've seen everything from a sparse collection of squares, to 8 different towers, each moving seperately, interweaving with each other, while you weave and bob amongst them.
If you have a half-decent machine (PC or Mac) I firmly recommend you give it a go. And if you're one of my flatmates, you can find it in f:\tranquility.
The gameplay isn't just old-school in that it's very simple, it also harks back to the early days when games could be abstract. When you couldn't possibly simulate in a realistic way, so game designers didn't bother, they went for the more imaginative "anything goes" approach. And that's what Tranquility is - there's no real world anywhere within 50 feet of the game. There's just abstract swirly shapes of different kinds. They move up and down, follow each other in spiral patters, disappear when you're least expecting it and then pop up just when it's least convenient. Oh, and the Spinner, which is somewhere in the midst of the swirling realms of strangeness, waiting for you to thread your way through the shimmering pulsating maze of otherness until you can find it, and be transported to a different shimmering maze.
Yup, that's the other thing that's old-school - there's no real change in levels. I mean, sure, they look different, but looking at a few levels so far, there's no easy way to tell which one's harder than the next (although some of them definitely are). The graphics, however, despite their simplicity (most of the pieces are rectangles, or warped versions thereof) are incredibly pretty. I've seen everything from a sparse collection of squares, to 8 different towers, each moving seperately, interweaving with each other, while you weave and bob amongst them.
If you have a half-decent machine (PC or Mac) I firmly recommend you give it a go. And if you're one of my flatmates, you can find it in f:\tranquility.
Re: Blast!
Date: 2002-07-20 10:28 am (UTC)You can use the '?' (hit it twice) to take a look at whether or not your using the hardware renderer. Hit it a 3rd time (?) and it shows you your frame rate.
If it's not running fast enough, you can try a number of things to speed it up, all relate to lowering the amount of video ram it needs:
Unlike most video games, we play at any resolution and we have tens of thousands of objects always in constant motion, including yourself - thus even though the geometry appears fairly *simple*, we are doing much more than most games that merely paint a texture onto a square and let you *drive* around that arena.