Level 3 Games Design - Unit 78 Digital Graphics In Computer Games - Jak Crane

Understand Theory And Applications Of Digital Graphics Used For Computer Games 

Artistic Styles:

In this blogs I am going to be exploring different artistic styles such as photo-realism, soft-shading and some more. Different games have different artistic styles and these styles have a big effect on the sort of feel the game gives to the gamer, and I am going to touch on this throughout this blog.

Photo-Realism:

Photo-Realism is the artistic style that you will tend to see in games like Forza, Formula 1 and Watchdogs, it is the style of making the game look so real you can question whether or not it is actually real or not. This is used to emerge the gamer in the game as much as possible so that the gamer actually in a sense feel like they are in the game. Here is a picture of a Photo-realistic game,

As you can see this car looks amazingly realistic but however it is not real it is in fact computer generated. The level of detail is what will trick you. This is my favourite artistic style for games as i feel that it is the most immersive for the gamer.

Soft Shading:

Soft Shading is another artistic style used in games design. this is an exact opposite of photo realism, this is graphics produced from process drawing. The drawing used to create the graphics will start off as nothing more than an outline of a character but will gradually grow into a detailed piece of work that creates an amazing character. here is an example of soft shading,

If you look in enough detail you can clearly see the contrast in the shading in this character's face and headphones to produce them and to give them a unique and authentic.

Exaggeration:

Exaggeration is another artistic style that gaming company use top create their games. It is called exaggeration as features about the game and about the characters in the game tend to be to perfect. For example if it is a character with short spiky hair, the ends of the hair would be to pointed, to over the top to be real so this is therefore known as exaggeration.

In this picture of Kazuya from Tekken and as you can see he fits the exaggeration style, if you turn your attention to his hair you can see that it perfectly goes into a point at the very back. it would be very difficult for a person in real life to do this with their hair. Exaggeration is one of my personal favourites this is as i think that the characters created using exaggeration is look, ascetically, very good and they fit the perfectly the effect they are attempting to create.

Abstract:

The next artistic type i am going to talk about is abstract. Abstract contains geometrical lines and shapes, which are often only used and seen in the confines of a game. These shapes and lines come in all different sizes and tend to be different colours.

If you watch this video of the video game Proun, you will see how the designer has cleverly used shapes and lines of all different sizes to create an obstacle course for the player to work his way through. The shapes and lines are also used to create a landscape that looks very artistic and soothes the readers eye.

Minimalist:

The minimalism style is the brevity of games design, it is a way to engage players efficiently by favouring simplicity over complexity. The general purpose of minimalism in games design is to accentuate a game's specific elements by limiting the the scope or detail of the other surrounding elements.

As you can see in this picture there is not a lot of complex art used to create the background and the characters and the castle. If you look close enough you can see that the whole picture is made in a sort of pixel form but one that is not fully pix-elated. This shows the simplicity used in making the game compared to something like photo realism.