Elements of Game Design: Environments

The environments of video games are kind of a big deal. A lot of games deal with immersing the player in their world for the sake of the experience. A good game environment will help to deliver the feel and mood of the game to the player, much like the art direction. In most games, you'll spend the vast majority of your time looking at some kind of environment and as such, environments are one of the main areas of a game to enforce the art direction of the project. Strong environment design will always add to the player experience, immersing the player, or even frightening and comforting the player.

A good example of this is the critically acclaimed Half Life 2, where you take control of the voiceless Gordon Freeman. Although you meet a great deal of very interesting characters, a lot of the game's emotion is provoked through the exquisite level design. From the empty sprawling streets of City 17 to the crumbling slaughterhouses of Ravenholm, the levels themselves serve to deliver the mood of the game. Tiny details in the environment like the claw-marks against the wooden boards, or the piles of rusted saws placed strategically by men before you tell stories of survival and battle in the streets of Ravenholm. Every aspect of the environment seeks to immerse you in not only the events of the present, but the history that has left its mark on the world.

Ravenholm. 5 star Bed and Breakfast. A smoke-free, pet-free, headcrab-free* getaway.

Good environment also lends itself to the overall gameplay experience. From the days of the original DOOM games, the layout of a level was one of the key aspects of the gameplay, with players memorising entire mazes in order to complete speed runs or best the game with higher scores. Even removing the artistic and story-telling elements of the environment, it is ultimately the playground on which the game will take place. Even Duke Nukem: 3D, with its countless hidden passageways and secrets allowed for replays and exploration to add to the experience. Bad environment design will hinder someone's enjoyment of a game on a basic level. To make an example of this, Zelda: Ocarina of Time's water temple suffers from an overly-confusing layout. This turns what would already be a difficult level into one of the least enjoyable points of the game.

As with most elements of a game's design, it is important that the environments fit well with the themes, characters and overall mechanics of a game. When all of these things come together and are unified under a central goal; the music and sound design amplifying the mood created by great level design and well-made characters, is when games can give some of their most memorable experiences.

image sources:

http://images.wikia.com/half-life/en/images/c/cf/Ravenholm_church.jpg
http://th04.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/f/2012/259/d/2/cryengine_3_forbidden_lands_game_environment_by_klass1987-d5eujyi.jpg

references:

http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/level_design_tutorials/how-to-plan-level-designs-game-environments-workflow.php
http://n4g.com/news/571327/10-great-game-environments#c-4010326

Elements of Game Design: Art Direction

 Art direction is pretty important. Where technical limitations of hardware can sometimes hinder the realisation of an artist's vision of a world, strong art direction can carry a game's visuals even without the use of cutting-edge technology. Since the very first games, art direction has always been a large aspect of development. Primarily, games as a medium are able to connect to players through two of their senses- sight and hearing. This makes the way a game looks incredibly important. As an example, the NES game "Castlevania" has a very particular art direction, entirely different in style and atmosphere to other games on the same system. Even in this era, when animations were very basic and 8-bit graphics denied artists the freedom we have today, artistic direction was intrinsically linked to the product's success as a whole.

Art direction can turn a visually dull game into something distinctive.

A game that looks like a painting. Yes.

More recently, game technology has evolved to the point where near-cgi level visuals are entirely possible, and this allows artistic directors more freedom than ever before. Before a player even picks up the controller, the visual style can tell them a great deal about the 'feel' of the game. From a quick glance at the visual design of the characters, someone could tell pretty quickly that Gears of War is probably going to play a little differently to Mario Galaxy. Not only can the art direction of a game speak for the content of the game itself, but it can give it a unique identity, causing it to stand out among other games. In recent years, the popularity of the military first-person-shooter has saturated the market in games with hyper-realistic art-styles, and games like Okami or Journey stand out with unique visual directions, taking inspiration from hand-painted artwork and cultural themes.


 
image sources:

http://www.enizr.com/media/27122/spec-ops-the-line-pc-demo-playthrough_a__2_.jpg
lunadigital.tv/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/okami20070130074554505jp9.jpg

references:

http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-art-of-spec-ops-the-line/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckami
http://kotaku.com/5927467/half+life-2-art-director-laments-the-stale-state-of-modern-video-games

Elements of game design: Game Mechanics.

Gyromite was full of weird mechanics

Woohoo, we're onto a big boy here. Mmmhmm, yes siree. We've talked about how a game looks, how a game's environment is built and how a game's characters inhabit that environment. But what about how a game plays? This is the big defining thingy. This is what separates games from every other medium on the planet. You watch films, you read books, you listen to music and you PLAY games. When you watch a movie you exist to soak up all the visual/audio information from the screen and that is how you experience it. Some films are cerebral, they require you to do some extra work in order to get the most out of them, but even if you don't do that extra work, the reel rolls on. A game demands much, much more from you. A game requires your input, and without that it wouldn't be a game.
Then what is a "Game mechanic"? Game mechanics are, in a sense, the pieces of game-play which form up to create the overall experience. Some mechanics are so fundamental to the genre of the game that they form a staple of the experience, where as some are so subtle that we forget they exist. Having control over your character is a very basic game mechanic that you'd assume was a part of every game- but it just ain't so. Gyromite for the NES allowed you to play whilst controlling the environment instead of the main character, for example. The ability to jump is another subtle game mechanic that has been around since the early arcade days and defines the very gameplay of the "platformer" genre- to jump from platform to platform. F.E.A.R spices up the standard FPS genre by adding "slow-motion" control to its roster of mechanics, giving you a crutch to lean on in more difficult sections of the game and shaking up the entire combat model of the experience.

"Be quiet, Fisher"

Technology has played a pretty large role in how game mechanics have evolved over the years, and certain modern mechanics such as F.E.A.R's slow mo, or the light/dark stealth systems of Splinter Cell, would not have been possible without modern technology. For a long time now we've been able to make Sam Fisher walk about the environment, but only when we have enough computing power to render shadows can we hide him within them. Go even further, and we can render real-time shadows that he can manipulate to create and destroy cover in the environment. Gameplay has certainly got more complicated over time. Walking from A to B is not a very complicated experience, but walking from A to B without being detected by enemies, and whilst moving shadows around the environment, is a much more thrilling experience. In this way, game mechanics are the bones which form the skeleton of a game. Strip away the graphics, the story and the sound, and this is what you have left. Even today, when we technology that allows destructible environments and perfect physics to enhance our games, sometimes its the most simple mechanics that make for the best games.

image links:

www.visualwalkthroughs.com/splintercell/mission9/34.jpg
agentpothead.com/gamewalls/images/Gyromite-1600x1200-RobotHobo.gif


reference links:

http://fear.wikia.com/wiki/Slow-Mo
http://gamestudies.org/0802/articles/sicart
http://uk.gamespy.com/articles/116/1160325p1.html