Video game Visual Styles week 3



Visual Styles Sam Bizley

Photorealistic style

This style is the most demanding and time consuming style to produce. The idea of Photorealism is to depict real life objects with 3d graphics. It brings a very “cinematic” experience to the game and can be uses to give a realistic depiction of events or a lifestyle the player would not normally encounter. To create this style you would need many highly skilled artists to create the textures and models used in the engine. You will also need more powerful hardware to render the finished product due to the higher poly count and level of detail over other styles. A game that uses Photorealism is The Last of Us from Naughty Dog. The game utilises in an in-game engine and an engine developed by company Havok for physics.

Here is a screenshot from the game The Last of Us.

You can clearly see the realistic level of detail and real size proportions. The style is used to create a level of immersion and realism in a post apocalyptic fantasy world. This heightens the tension of the game and allows the player to become absorbed in its world by allowing a connection between real life and the game, in the visual style. With a realistic visual style I find that the player's level of empathy and attachment to the characters is greater than in any other style. Other examples of Photorealistic visual styles are LA Noire, Grand Theft Auto 5.


This screenshot from the game LA Noire shows the photorealistic style of the game. It uses this style to recreate a period of history (the 1920s) and add a fantasy element to it (serial killer murder mystery).

Cel-Shaded style

This visual style uses a hand drawn style to make 3d shapes appear 2d. It is fairly new visual style used a lot in Japanese Video games. It is often used to mimic the visual style of Comic books and Graphic Novels. It uses sharp lines to exaggerate things such as emotions and expressions on characters so it is very clear. The Walking Dead is a game made my Telltale Games in a creation tool called Telltale Tool. They use a cel shaded style to draw comparisons to the Walking Dead comic series. It is quite a simplistic style to use and allows for more story content to be created, while not sacrificing the ability to create recognisable characters and emotions. Some examples of this style are Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm, Borderlands, The Wolf Among us.

Here is a screenshot from the game The Walking Dead.

You can see the facial features are clearly drawn in black so that it is very obvious what the character is displaying emotionally. This ties in very well to the games theme of consequential actions and managing character's emotions. It creates a distinctly "cartoon like" theme but still resembles real life people and objects.

This is a screenshot from the game Borderlands from Gearbox Software. It uses the same cel shaded, cartoon style to depict a very different universe. It uses the exaggerated proportions and strong facial features to create a fantastical, futuristic universe.

Abstract

This style is a very unique style and is not based on any real life references. It usually uses vector drawn geometric shapes and is much more cost and time effective style to create. This style doesn't require a great deal of skill to make. Some abstract games use bright and vivid colours to capture the player's attention and create a sense of urgency. The original Space Invaders game could be considered an abstract art style game. It uses very simple shapes to depict unusual alien like images. It uses very bright colours and a black background to create a space theme and it compliments the very fast paced, arcade gameplay.

Another example of an abstract style game is Geometry Wars

As you can see there are a lot of bright polygons on the screen. This creates a feeling of urgent, reflex, moment to moment gameplay. The game is very fast paced and exciting which matches the vibrant style.

Exaggerated style

This style is more or less based around photorealism. It takes real life characters and objects and exaggerates and enhances them. Many Japanese games utilise this style to create almost "god like" protagonists and characters that are way beyond any realistic depiction. Tekken is a fighting game that's characters are all overly muscular with wacky hair cuts and striking clothes and Final Fantasy is a game that has similar overly muscular characters with gravity defying hair cuts and giant weapons. These games are examples of the very distinct Japanese style of many games. A good example of a more western game that uses exaggerated style is Rocksteady's Batman games. Here is a screenshot from the first game in the series, Arkham Asylum.

The characters in this screenshot are depictions of real people but massively exaggerated. Batman is literally meant to appear twice the size of another human being and even against this overly muscular enemy he is still the more muscular. All of his features including his facial features are enhanced to make him look more like the stereotypical protagonist.

Here is a screenshot of the game Tekken.

The male characters muscularity is exaggerated and they have profoundly masculine facial features whereas the women have very symmetrical feminine features and are somewhat overly sexualized.

Fluid Artwork style

The game Okami broke new ground by having a style that aimed to mimic real life paintings and Japanese calligraphy. It uses a distinctive cel shaded type style that uses a dynamic called the "Celestial Brush" where the player draws objects into the world which uses a calligraphy brush animation. The games visuals are very much inspired by Japanese folklore and history. The main character, that the player controls, is Amaterasu the Japanese sun god in wolf's form. The game aims to keep fluidity when playing the game and drawing in objects very much how real Japanese calligraphy is done. This contributes to a very sleek and flowing experience in both visual style and gameplay.



Notice the "brush stroke" textures making it appear like a painting.

Braid is a small indie game that was developed by Jonathan Blow and artists Mike Corriero and David Hellman. The games initial artwork took a year to complete and looks just like illustrations from a book. It is similar to Okami in that it attempts to recreate the feeling of a fluid painting, but does so in a slightly different way. Since the game is 2D rather than 3D it uses real artwork for animations and backgrounds.



As you can see from the screenshot it has a profoundly watercolour painting feel to the aesthetics.
This style could be considered a completely separate visual style than Okami but it is essentially the same idea with different visual planes. However it shows how vastly different the same style is when comparing 2D to 3D.

Rotoscope Animation

Rotoscoping is an animation technique where animators draw over live footage frame by frame. This technique is used in live action films and animated films. Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is a point and click puzzla game where the cutscenes are animated using Rotoscope animation. It is realistic art style that gives the illusion of looking like a pencil line drawing that has come to life and is a very interesting way of displaying characters.

You can see from this screenshot the distinctive pencil drawn style of rotoscoping. It gives a personality to the game and requires the artist to find different, more subtle ways of representing characters movements and emotions

Pixel Art



Pixel art is an artistic style characterised by editing images on a pixel level. It is a type of digital art that is created through using Raster image software. The modern use of this style aims to emulate the art from older games created in the 1980's and 1990's that was prevalent because of the limitations at that time. A fairly popular game that uses modern day pixel art is Fez by Polytron. Here you can see the deliberate use of very small square blocks(pixels) to give the game a retro feel. Fez uses pixel art to give the feeling of being inside a video game, while still retaining beautiful aesthetics.



Another example of modern day pixel art is the game Gods Will Be Watching by Deconstructeam.

Prince of Persia + original assassins creed + ico + shadow of the collossus

computer game graphics
-pixel art, 2d graphics, sprites
-concept art, weapons, characters, backgrounds
-texture art, materials such as stone, wood, gravel,
-background graphics, eg walls, forest, clouds
-in game interface, ie heads up display
-Print media art, eg game packaging, box cover, game manual, label, poster, advertisements

pixel

types of digital graphics
-Raster: BMP, GIF, TIFF, JPG
-Vector: PSD, WMF, FLA, AI

file extensions
compression
image capture
optimizing
storage of image assets

use subject terminology
add pictures, videos, examples
Perspective visual styles ie 2d, 3d, fps, platformer, top down.   
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