Legend of Grimrock Interview
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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.
