Unit 78 - Computer Games Design - Artistic Styles

Unit 78 - Computer Games Design

Artistic Styles

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Within this document I am going to be researching artistic styles from various games, and explain why they have chosen that style for the game.

Photorealism – Photorealism is used to make games seem as realistic as possible, to make the player feel immersed, making the player believe that he/she is inside the game, that it could be possible for the concept of the game to be within the real world.

Photorealism is used in most games today and is increasingly popular in FPS (First Person Shooter) and free roam/open world games.

As we can see, this location within the game is very realistic. The developers could have taken a picture (with a digital camera) of a rundown building and imported it into the game. 

Most consoles will have processing problems, so the game has to be tested, then possibly tweaked if the selected console has trouble running the game at a certain FPS (also known as Frames Per Second).

Exaggeration – Many exaggerated games tend to resemble cartoons, such as: Zelda, Naruto, that change how characters and scenery are in an over the top way. Yet, even photorealistic games can merge with exaggerated aspects. Batman for example is a photorealistic game but his body proportions are exaggerated, along with the scenery having an increase in bloom effects and lighting saturation.

Zelda exaggerates the characters eyes, the colours, making them very bright and vibrant, then the light that gives off a beautiful, overly colourful, happy atmosphere in this picture.

Batman is quite the opposite of Zelda, not in the fact that one looks more realistic but because of the saturation of the lighting. It’s quite bland and gloomy, his muscles are exaggerated, and water reflections off of characters are extremely bright.

Cel Shading – Cell shading games tend to have a comical feel to them because of the black out line that surrounds everything. There is also usually quite a clean cut look to objects, followed by bright colours.

As we can see, BorderLands 2 is a cel shaded game. The colours are bright and vibrant, which is especially visible on the monsters gem like legs.

Abstract - Abstract is the complete opposite from photorealism. It doesn’t try to resemble any shape, form, or object from the real world.

A good example of this is Geometry Wars. This is obviously does not resemble the real world. There are space ships, bright colours, with a neon style, bullets flying everywhere and weird snake ships.