{"id":6215,"date":"2020-09-01T19:03:43","date_gmt":"2020-09-02T02:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=6215"},"modified":"2020-09-01T19:03:43","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T02:03:43","slug":"frostborn-wrath-world-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/6215","title":{"rendered":"Frostborn Wrath: World Map"},"content":{"rendered":"

I said before that Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath<\/em> seemed shorter than Chasing Shadows<\/em>, because I had already reached the extents of the world map, but this didn’t really jibe with other observations, like the greater number of Achievements. It turns out I was simply mistaken. I had reached the left, right, and top edges of the map, as indicated by a decorative border, but, unlike CS<\/em>, the map here is taller than it is wide. It’s like a scroll of unknown length. This makes progress feel more linear: where my explorations in CS<\/em> spread out in all directions, in FW<\/em> they mostly just go downward, with minor branching. The original Gemcraft<\/em> did something similar, but scrolled horizontally.<\/p>\n

The map in CS<\/em> was made of hexagonal tiles that you unlock over the course of play, each tile being a grouping of several levels, which also have to be unlocked individually. FW<\/em> is similar, but its map tiles are shaped like 60-degree diamonds in a hexagonal tiling pattern, thematically resembling snowflakes when six come together at a point. In both cases, the tiles seem a bit superfluous, giving the player nothing but an extra layer of stuff to unlock on the way to unlocking new fields. Still, completing a level and seeing a new tile appear gives a sense of progress, and dividing the levels into subsections this way gives you permission to feel a small sense of accomplishment whenever an entire tile is completed.<\/p>\n

Still, I have to say that my favorite world map in the whole series is that of Gemcraft: Labyrinth<\/em>, which didn’t use tiles at all. Instead, it put all the battlefields on a 13×13 grid, and identified each field with grid coordinates. The key thing here is that the fields were connected<\/em>. Every monster path coming in from the edge of a field matched up with a similar path on the neighboring field on that side. Hence “labyrinth”: the whole game was a single connected maze. (Well, apart from four secret levels in the corners, inaccessible by normal means.) It was a compelling conceit, and made the whole game feel more like a real space, rather than just a collection of isolated levels selectable from a map-shaped menu. And I just love that sort of thing, when disparate pieces gel into something cohesive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I said before that Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath seemed shorter than Chasing Shadows, because I had already reached the extents of the world map, but this didn’t really jibe with other observations, like the greater number of Achievements. It turns out I was simply mistaken. I had reached the left, right, and top edges of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[460,461,563,674],"class_list":["post-6215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gemcraft","tag-gemcraft-labyrinth","tag-gemcraft-chasing-shadows","tag-gemcraft-frostborn-wrath"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6216,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215\/revisions\/6216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}