Hi Tom.
Just a miner correction, Terraformers doesn't actually use that system,
Terraformers is full first person similar to swap or shades, however you
cannot side step which makes movement a little clunky, though workable for
the puzzle type game terraformers is.
Operation Black square from Dragonaps has that sort of movement, as does
Airic the clerric, as a conscious effort to echo the top down perspective of
something like zelda, and of course Entombed uses it in Dungeons. Then there
are the arcade games like super deakout (and it's original), Great toy
robbery, super egghunt and so on, although there the movements are less tyle
based and a little more fluid.
Myself, this is how I've personally always got that sort of movement system,
a top down third person view in audio as opposed to the first person view
used by something like Swamp or shades of doom (or indeed terraformers). The
only problem I've noticed is that it's very difficult in this perspective to
actually give the player the ability to anticipate and learn there way
around enemy attacks, meaning that your either running away as soon as you
perceive an enemy, or just having a "hear it, hit it fast" sort of gameplay,
which is why games in this view never really held my attention despite the
design on many other aspects something like night of parasite has.
The only way I could see it working is some sort of enemy viewer letting you
know the distance and position of nearby enemies rather like the object view
in shades, and then sounds for specific attacks so that when you came upon a
given enemy who attacked you would know how to avoid them, eg, a sound for
ramming, a sound for shooting etc, though this would make the game feel
somewhat closer to playing chess or even playing a roguelike than a fast
action audio game.
in general I'm not really convinced this view is up to fast action, accept
of the very basic hear a sound and move towards or away style of gameplay
which games like super egghunt have, though as I've said, this is almost a
general problem of audio games, how to present the player with enough
information to require them to make snap judgements rather than basic
reactions, albeit games like swamp have included much of that.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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