graphics specification

Graphics Specification:

Visual Styles:

Cell Shading is giving an object or character to look like a comic book or hand drawing book. This can be used to give flat colour to have an impression on character or an object. The cell shading can use lighting to have effect on dynamic atmosphere of the mood. Also shading to give it drawing theme to it. For example ‘Naruto Ninja Storm 4’, and new ‘Dragonball Xenoverse’.

Abstraction is the opposite of photorealism, as it does not look realistic. Abstraction can be used to stand out. Some of the object may have resembles to other objects. It usually using game that colourful. This can be used in PG 6 games like ‘SUBRAY’. As it can look friendly. The abstraction use a colourful colours to set feeling calm and exploration. Or on other times it can be used to make game grim and brutal, like ‘Super Meat Boy’. It uses a sharp and hard objects, as it gives a brutal mood to the player.

Exaggeration is mostly used in RPG (Role Playing Game). This can give a fantasy mood in the game. The exaggeration is used by games that is influenced by Comics, Cartoons and Animes. For example ‘Batman Arkham Knight’, the main character has over exaggerated muscles. Also ‘Final Fantasy 7 Remake’, and again the main character has a ridiculously large sword.

Photorealism is term used to make game to make realistic as much. This can be used to make game look as much as the real world. This used in ‘The Last of Us’ and ‘Ghost Recon: Wildlands’. Most Photorealism games are mostly seen in action, horror, survival, and shooter game.

Pixel styled games use chuck, 8 bit graphics. It uses a similar style from 1980s games. Creating a Pixel art is user to create, rather than doing 3D, 64 bit games. Which will take less time to develop. This is used in ’The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth’. They use it as a brutal game as main character has to survive through the dungeons. Using the 8 Bit to give it a brutal atmosphere. Or it can be used to give friendlier feel to it – like ‘Terraria’.

Typography:

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point size, line length, line-spacing (leading), letter-spacing (tracking), and adjusting the space within letters pairs (kerning).

Technical Stuff:

They are to go type of formats good for different uses in computer game graphics. Such as JPEG and PNG.

JPEG compresses the best for photographs and images with no sharp borders. However, your images will have degraded quality because JPEG uses lossy compression (you can fine tune the compression level/degradation when exporting images as JPEG. Refer to your imaging software's documentation for more information on this).

However, as good as JPEG may be, it doesn't support transparency. This is crucial if you want to have images that show through others, or if you want images with irregular shapes. GIF is a good choice, but it has been largely superseded by PNG (there's only a few things GIF supports that PNG doesn't, but they're largely irrelevant in game programming).

PNG supports transparency (and semitransparency), compresses data without degradation in quality (i.e. it uses lossless compression), and compresses fairly well, but not as much as JPG.

Composition:

Composition is all about placement across all forms of art (Media, Film, Video games). The rule of the third is a useful tool to learn about composition, you draw a three by three grid and where the lines of this grid meet shows you where to place things to make them visually appealing to the eye.

Stimulus  

Client brief?:

The client brief is a set of rules set by an employer.

Own brief?:

Your own brief are guidelines that you set yourself based on what your employer has told you to do.

Market research?:

market research is when you see what genres of games are popular and what’s selling well.

 ideas generation

Brainstorming?: 

Is coming up with ideas in groups.

Moodboards?:   

Moodboards are used to generate ideas for the mood of your game.

Thumbnail sketching?:

This is when you come up with ideas for items that might go into your project and then drawing some ideas on paper. 

Concept drawings?:

These are ideas for characters, weapons, vehicles and backgrounds that you can sketch out on paper.

Legal and ethical considerations

What is copyright law?: copyright means that if you create something and it’s protected by copyright law no one else can use it to make money from it without your permission.

What is libel?: 

libel is a form of defamation, expressed by print, writing, pictures, signs, effigies, or any communication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person's reputation, exposes a person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule, or injures a person in his/her business or profession.

How are female characters represented in games?:

generally in gaming women are over sexualized and are commonly created to have many unrealistic features. however in recent years this has changed a lot thanks to games like tomb raider and Fifa.

What is intellectual property?:

Intangible property that is the result of creativity, such as patents, copyrights, etc.    

Pre-Production and Planning for a Computer Game

Pre-Production and Planning for a Computer Game

Types of production:

Types of production is when you decide what type of product you are making, for example you might be making a video game, a movie or a music video.

Finance: 

There are a few different types of financing, there is self-financing, indie funding and crowd funding are a few methods for funding a game. Self-financing is when you completely fund a game project by yourself, usually when some self-funds a game they work a normal job and make the game in their spare time. Most indie games are zero budget/self-funded. That means the developer works on the game in their spare time, while working a normal job. If the first game makes them money they can then use that to go full time and fund their next game. Crowd funding is when you use a site like kick starter to get normal people to give you money to develop your game. There are two types of crowd funding, donation based and reward based. Donation based it when people give you money because they like your product and want to help you fund it. When I make my game I won’t be needing any kind of funding because the software I’ll be using is free to use.

Time constraints:  

Time constraints are when you are working to a deadline and making sure a project doesn’t take too long so people stay interested in whatever product you are producing.

Personnel:  

There are a number of people needed in order to create a game, you’ll need a producer, a publisher, a designer, an artist and programmer generally the main people you’ll need to develop a game. Producers are in charge of managing the development team, schedules, reports progress, hires and assigns staff and so on. The publisher is responsible for publishing the game. Video game publishers are also responsible for their product's manufacturing and marketing, including market research and all parts of advertising. Publishers normally finance the development process. When I make my game I won’t need anyone else to help me because my game isn’t that complex so I can make it by myself.

Facilities:

To create something you’ll need the facilities to do it, for example if you plan on making a triple a game you’ll need a whole office for people in your development team. For my game ill need to use the computers in the games development room in college.

Materials:

In order to create anything you need the materials to do so, for example if you’re making a video game you’ll need game development software, for example I am currently making a platform game using game maker.

Contributors and codes of practice:  

Contributors are people you might need to create your game, for example voice actors, artists, if you’re making a game about World War 2 you might need an expert about it to make it look more professional and realistic. Codes of practice is the legal side of developing something, for example copyright, health and safety laws, Insurance such as public liability and completion insurance.

Unit 78 digital graphics for computer games

Unit 78 Digital Graphics for Computer Games

Artistic styles in video games

There are lots of different types of artistic styles used in video games such as cell shading, photo realism and exaggerated are just a few. Some developers will even use more than one of these styles in one game.

Photo-realism:

Photo realism is when developers of a computer game attempt to make a game that tries to look and replicate real life. In recent year’s developers have started more and more photo realistic games because as technology gets better and more advanced developers have the tools to create games that look more and more like real life. Here are a few examples of photo-realistic games that have been created in recent years:

-Forza motorsport 5

This is a game that over the years has gotten more and more realistic as technology has gotten better and more advance the developers of Forza have been able to create a game that can be difficult to tell to distinguish from real life. This car was created by the developers Forza in engine and looks amazingly close to a real life photograph.

-Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 is one of the most popular first person shooter games that exists today. This game looks almost as close to real life as you can get for a game in this genre, it was created by EA using the frostbite 3 engine and in the right hands this engine can be used to create amazingly realistic games. This picture has been created in the frostbite engine for battlefield 4 and looks a lot like a real photograph. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqRQiBiiYQc

Exaggerated:

This art style is most commonly used in anime and manga, this style of art is when the designer or artist exaggerates parts of characters, characters emotions and environments, most games that use this art style normally have a Japanese influence. When using this art style designers often exaggerate things like the characters eyes and other facial features to show emotion or weapons that that character will use, for example a designer may create a character with big eyes and an ear to ear smile who uses a sword or machine gun that’s twice the size of his entire body. The colours and lighting that appears in this style can also be much exaggerated, for example colours might be much brighter than normal or designers can really go overboard with lighting and shadowing on characters.

-Dark soul’s series

Dark souls is a game where characters, weaponry and armor and are very exaggerated, this is largely because the game was created by a Japanese development studio called from software, because of this in this players can wield weapons and armor that is greatly exaggerated and even the strongest humans could never use, for example there is a weapon call dragon tooth that is about three times the size of your character. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msuai1vjqiE 

-Dragon ball games

Dragon ball z games are fighting games based off the anime/manga dragon ball. These games use over the top special attacks and some characters are inhumanly muscular, all the characters can fly and some use over the top weapons and some attacks can destroy planets and change the map you are fighting on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nentx1j1Xk

Cell shading:

Cell shading is becoming a very popular art style for game designers. Originally it was used in animation but it has since been recreated to be a games design style, in games cell shading makes games look cartoonish, almost resembling a comic book, these games look colourful and fun to look at. This style is really popular with games that started out as comic books.

-Borderlands

Borderlands is a very popular game series and one of the most popular cell shaded games, this game also uses an exaggerated style, this game looks very cartoony and all the characters, weapons and most things in the game have black lines around them making this game feel and look like a cartoon. Most of the characters are very un-proportional, for example some characters have really fat bodies and some have really big muscles.       

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Borderlands-2-Tiny-Tina-DLC-Gameplay-Video-Screenshots-Feature-Dwarves-Mages-56152.html

- Simpsons road rage:

The Simpsons road rage is a driving game where you drive around Springfield basically destroying things and racing the other residents of Springfield. The cell shading in this game really works because it really suits the Simpson’s cartoony feel and art style from the TV program

Abstract:

Abstract games are pretty much games that try to get as far away from realism as possible. These games almost always have features that are unrealistic and look different to different people. The style normally consists of lines and shapes that don’t really resemble anything from reality. Games that use this art style are becoming more popular in recent years.

Proteus:

Proteus is an open world exploration game, this game is based around adventuring and discovering an island, there aren’t really any specific goals. You explore an environment where every creature and plant has a musical signature that is unique to it, this changes the sounds and general audio in game depending where you are. The game world is randomly generated which mean each world is unique.

Tuning:

This is a 3D abstract platformer that is really unique even for an abstract game, it has no fixed camera angles and has organically moving sections. The goal of this game is to complete levels that get more strange and abstract.

Noir art style:  

Games that use this style look dark and depressing at times, they often have a 50s/60s feel about them but this art style has been used across many styles of games, most commonly side-scroller/2D indie games. This art style is also used a lot in the film industry in films like Sin City and The Watchmen.

-Limbo:

Limbo is a puzzle/platformer game where you play as a boy with no name and guide him through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The game is presented in black-and-white tones and using lighting and editing effects to create a horror type atmosphere while the player navigates through the game world.

-Calvino Noir

Calvino noir is a point and click adventure game based on a 240 year old sketch. The mechanics of the game are relatively simple and the story is interesting, but the games main selling point are the visuals inspired by the film noir art style.    http://www.wired.com/2015/08/film-noir-french-architecture-inspired-stunning-adventure-game/