Choosing an Art Style
(The last of us 2, not my image)
(Ghost of Tsushima, not my image)
As I exaimed in my dissertation, most modern game environments are spilt into 3 categories, Caricaturism (more commonly referred to as stylized), photorealism and abstractionism.
The 15 Highest-Grossing Video Games Of The Decade (And How Much They Made)
As exaimed in this article, the past decade of best selling games has been relatively even spilt between stylized and realism, so picking either categordy is appropriate for a new, relevant game environment.
- Uncanny Valley – a term where photorealistic graphics are so realistic it becomes off-putting to the user.
- With photorealism, users tend to look for flaws naturally and imperfections can stick out, compared to a stylized game where the user already believes the people and the environment are not real so imperfections are often ignored or unnoticed
Common themes throughout these examples of realistic games
- Lighting plays a massive part of what makes a game photorealistic. Either in a way where its contrasting the environment, casting shadows or providing a highlight to assets, it gives users eyes direction.
- You can produce realistic assets and textures but the whole world needs to be carefully planned. For example if producing a building, the building should be something architectually fesible.
- The theme is consistant throughout the whole game. Players need to be completely immersed in the world so if an apoloypitic scene has clean streets and buildings the user is taken out of the immersion
- Small details matter. The user will pick up on something even if they don’t know what it is. For example if a theres a cardboard box, but it has no details or shipping, labels, tape or damage to it, it looks too perfect and out of place
- Assets should match the area and theme. For example if the environment is set in america the assets should look believable for that area
- No set rules on making art styles, some win awards for just being unique and eye-catching
- Consistancy is very important, you can have any art style but the graphics need to be consistant or player looses immersion
- How to keep an art style consistant – shapes -colours – Genre
- Genre – what feelings are you trying to envoke with your game? spooky? silly? You do this mainly by shape and colour
- Colours associate with emotion, red is anger, blue is sad
Colors
When working with photorealism, there isn’t a set color palette like there would be in a stylized game. In a stylized game, you are creating usually an imaginary world from scratch so you set the terms of how the world looks. For photorealism, you are technically working from ‘photos’ or trying to replicate a believable, real world, so the color palette is what the eye normally picks up. To keep me in line with what I’m trying to replicate, I took some images and drew colors from them as a reference point for my theme.
