Artistic Styles & Comparing Games

Cel-Shaded

This is an art style that mimics the look found in comic books and is mainly used by Japanese developed games such as Killer is Dead and Jet Set Radio. It is designed to make 3D images appear flat like 2D by taking out the gradient effect in shading and replacing it with simple coloured shading. It also involves realistic elements, but characters made in this style look very different to real people. For example, in the image below the character has around sixteen arms instead of two.



Photo-Realism

This is an art style that tries to look nearly identical to real life and is found in games such as Grand Theft Auto V and L.A Noire, and is designed to make images look as realistic as possible, down to the blackheads. Video games in this style are usually made using motion capture technology as shown in the images below.

Exaggerated

This is an art style that is loosely based on real-life. This is because although the characters may look real, they are made to look exaggerated. For example in the game “Gears of war”, the main human characters look realistic but their body size is much larger than normal. Using exaggerated graphics can allow you to create crazy elements like hairstyles and eyes without worrying about it being realistic or physically possible.

Abstract

This is an art style that doesn't resemble other styles in any way and is often made to be unrealistic. The style usually involves shapes and lines and uses random shapes and colours to create images unique to gaming. A game known as “Geometry Wars” is made up of only geometric shapes and colour but is still a very fun and creative game.

When creating a game, developers will need to consider various elements that are required for the art and graphics they want to use in their game.

Computer game graphics

They will need to think about the level of graphics that they want to include in their game. Making a computer game with very high graphics options will mean that only people with top-end computers can run them, which could potentially decrease sales. Making a game with low graphics could result in a low detailed game but it will be playable by a lot more people. Game graphics involves elements like dynamic lighting, draw distance, tessellation and shadowing.

Pixel

A pixel is a point sample (not a square) that contains colours from the RGB or CYMK pattern. Pixels make up the resolution of images so when making an image or video the creator will need to think about this. For example, an image that is made in a 1080p resolution will be very clear and in high definition. If the viewer couldn't view the image in that resolution, then the creator could also create a 720p or 480p version that is of less quality but can still be viewed. In video games, there are options that you can change for things like the texture quality etc. Having more than one option can let people with budget-computers play the game.

Types of digital graphics

There are two types or images used in games: Raster images such as gif, bmp,  jpg and tiff, and vector images such as psd, wmf, fla and ai. Raster images are made up of thousands of pixel and mainly use the RGB format, but these images can not be stretched and scaled. However, vector images can be stretched and scaled, and will retain their quality when doing so.

File Extentions

File extensions are important for telling the user what program can open certain files. For example, the extension “.jpg” can be opened by nearly everyone with a computer as the operating system will recognize it. But a file extension named “.psd” requires the program “Photoshop” to open and can not open without the correct software. Other examples or extensions are: bmp, png, gif, tiff and doc.

Compression

Compression is the technique used to remove unnecessary areas from an image for easier storage and sharing. There are two ways to compress: “lossy” or “lossless”. Lossy compression is the best way as it means that bitmap files can be reduced in size without the problem of a reduced image quality. Lossless compression involves changing all of the same shades of a colour in an image into just one, this can make the image look much worse.

Image Capture

Images in games can be captured in many different ways the main ones being through camera and motion sensors. With a camera the photographer can take several photos of an object or location and have the designers/artists recreate them in the game. A similar thing happens with motion sensing, people will act out parts of games and the animators will recreate them in-game.

Optimization

Optimization involves taking a large image file and reducing it's size by lowering the amount of colours and tones used. Doing this allows you to transfer files a lot quicker between people and makes loading these images on a website much faster.

Image Asset Storage

This is useful for games companies as it means that they can pass around files and images between workers so that work can be done quicker and easier. It also means that everyone can add to the same task rather than everyone doing the same thing. The only downside is that you're unable to share large files, but you're still able to share files such as Jpegs, tiffs and gifs. If you needed to share a file that was too large it will either get damaged or lost. However, you could reduce the size of the file from 1080p resolution to a lower size like 720p or even 480p. This would also reduce the size of the file allowing it to be shared, but it would be in less quality.

Comparing Games

Games like "Really Big Sky" and "Wolfenstein: The New Order" are drastically different games visually, but when you look at them closely there could be some similarities.

The game "Really Big Sky" uses an abstract art style that is seen commonly in indie games but takes away the geometric shape style to create something beautiful. Whereas the game "Wolfenstein: The New Order", uses a photo-realistic style that makes the game look and feel very-realistic. When it comes to the graphics of these games, "Really Big Sky" has very simple options that allows the game to be playable on nearly all hardware, but "Wolfenstein: The New Order" has very advanced graphics options such as anti-aliasing, shadows and more, which - although looks visually brilliant - makes it very difficult to run on most computers. In "Really Big Sky" the pixel size and quality of the images are fairly small and simplistic so that nearly all hardware can handle it but not small enough to look bad. Whereas the pixel size and image quality in "Wolfenstein: The New Order" is very high making the game look very polished but once again makes it very difficult for average hardware to load it.

Video games today that have the option to change the resolution usually use vector images as their digital graphics type. This is because vector images can be stretched into different sizes. Video games in the past would have likely used raster images as they could not be stretched and had smaller file sizes.

The games "Really Big Sky" and "Wolfenstein: The New Order" would have gone through compression at different stages of development. This would allow big files to be reduced in size at the cost of image quality and small files to be reduced without any loss of quality. A game like "Wolfenstein: The New Order" would have probably never gone through compression as the game looks stunning and is very large at a whopping 50gb. But "Really Big Sky" could potentially have gone through compression to reduce the games size.

Most photo-realistic games use motion-capture to make characters look as human as possible. No other art styles can use this technology really as it is meant to make characters look real and other art styles aren't meant to be realistic. The developers of "Wolfenstein: The New Order" used this technology for realistic cut-scenes, whereas the developers of "Really Big Sky" had no reason to use motion-capture because they weren't trying to be realistic.

If developers wanted to send and share images between workers and external companies/freelancers, they could use image asset storage. However, there is a file size limit to this so files would have to be reduced in size using compression or optimization.