Legend of Grimrock Interview

SplitKick is offering a brief interview with Legend of Grimrock developers Almost Human Games on their successful indie first-person dungeon crawler, which has some rather interesting answers concerning the reason they went real-time rather than turn-based, what they think differentiates the title from its spiritual predecessors and more. Here’s a snip:

SK: Did you ever consider making combat turn-based to match the tile-based movement?

Turn-based combat was never an option because our starting point was in the style of Dungeon Master, which is realtime. What we like in the realtime combat is that it brings in timing and skill of movement to the strategy. Also the puzzles, which are the core element of the game, benefit from using timing as a challenge. What we learned when designing Legend of Grimrock is that Dungeon Master had a relatively low frame rate which was actually an important factor in the gameplay. The frame rate was slow enough to give the player time to think between actions, and in that way it had a bit of turn-based flavor in it. We made a similar design in Legend of Grimrock that cools down the players attacks in order to give the player a chance to think about his strategy, instead of banging out attacks as fast as he can. In practice the player has to keep moving in order to avoid getting hit and gets an opportunity to decide his strategy for the next attack. Although realtime is a different approach that turn-based it does have a strategic element in the gameplay that can get pretty intense for time to time.