World on a Game Board

I have never played a PC-98 game, and definitely never played the PC-98 game GAGE. It is firmly caught in my brain wrinkles, though, after I watched a gameplay video of the game. It looks fun based on what I can tell of this original Japanese version*, but I could be completely wrong! The actual mechanics of the game are a bit of a mystery to me, but I think I get the gist. In some ways, I like leaving the particulars a mystery, because perhaps that makes the level display even more enchanting. 

GAGE for the PC-98 in action

Shown as an isometrically displayed “game board,” your characters move about the limited amount of level displayed, as the board appears and vanishes off the edges as needed. No “fog of war” or “obscured angles” are used here, because there seems to be enough mystery just one space over on the playfield. This whole layout is reminiscent of Populous, but just feels different when you’re not an omnipotent overseer, but instead controlling a small character inside the game board directly.

After watching some of the video, instead of deciding the play the game, I felt like I had to hammer together a similar set of level and game board mechanics in a quick and dirty prototype. I just wanted to think through getting this made, and then most likely send the whole project away to a corner of my hard drive and GitHub to never be seen again.

First, I bashed together an architecture of sorts, trying my hardest not to expand beyond the very small scope of “working game board representation of a level.” That meant no enemies, no combat, no decorations even. That doesn’t really make managing user input, handling the input, state management, and other basics tasks simple, but I tried to keep them to a minimum.

For this, I just set things up to work with two two-dimensional arrays, one for the level layout and one for what was displayed on the board. Then set up the math to just be a simple coordinate shift from the bottom corner of the level to the bottom corner of the board. When the player shifts close to an edge, the level has to slide over one space, populate the next row and send a batch of now unneeded level pieces to an object pool. Moving around in this way was fairly trivial, with the trickiest bits being the handling of when the player gets close to the level edge and maintaining a “dead zone” in the middle of the board where the board doesn’t move along with the player.

Working prototype of the game board

Even though I didn’t go nuts getting this set up, it should be pretty malleable to different board sizes, level sizes, dead zone sizes, etc. If this were to be used for a real game, I would definitely work up an easier way to create a level. I just did the bare minimum with some brute force integer editing in code to get something to test the features. For a real game, there would also be a need for actual things of interest and different versions of walls, floors, doors, and so on of course. Again, I just wanted the movement to work.

Squint at this brute force layout array and you can see an overhead view of the level

It populates the board quickly and reacts well to all movements so far on my pretty sub-par PC. Elements are all moving in and out of object pools, and traversal of the different arrays with each move are minimal. If this concept does ever escape that hard-drive back corner, I think this is a good starting point, or at least a good set of lessons to use when making something with a full design in this vein.

Player piece at its spawn point and showing off some low saturation colors for some reason

It’s also fun to consider the options possible while working in a 3D engine (Unity) as opposed to the 2D isometric sprite work the GAGE developers had to wrangle. If the board angle looks funky to me, or the lighting off, I can make some easy adjustments without throwing out most—or any—art. For one thing, using WASD controls on an isometric board is pretty weird, so shifting to QEZC might be nice, or even rotating the board to be straight on–a concept that would lose the fun isometric idea, but maintain the game board movement that drew me in.

Rotate the camera, and we’re safely out of the isometric

For now, my need to get this concept into an engine and running has been satisfied. I’m still considering playing the actual game, but also still trying to resist one more RPG in my life. Regardless of what’s next, making this small and rough prototype was an enjoyable exercise, so I’m kind of hoping to use an expanded version of this idea someday.



*There is an English fan translation available if you feel so inclined to try that out. I would like to, but I’m already buried under officially translated RPGs to play and so I am resisting the urge.