I love drawing characters, so it’s no surprise that they’ll usually take center stage. That is if I bother to give them a stage. Because most of the time, I’ll just leave them standing in the big empty.
⚡️Dynamic Character Illustration Learn professional drawing and coloring techniques for creating dynamic characters full of movement!
Our tactical roadtripper, TRUNDL.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-filactery, flings you through a gauntlet of environments, each with their own distinct color palette and style. Between each one, you’ll guide TRUNDL.buddy through decisions, shaping both mind and journey.
IT IS HARD
Early on, I wanted the music to branch alongside the narrative, incorporating different genres to reflect the changing personality of the player’s character. Violent or aggressive choices might transition to death metal or the militaristic styling of Battlestar Galactica. Pacifistic choices might swing more acoustic, Appalachian. Aside from the obvious challenges of producing such a wide variety of cues for every level in the game, there was another less obvious problem. The baseline song would need a neutral tone.
Creating music without emotion has been incredibly challenging for me. I’ve always felt the two are inextricable. But over the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered an interesting approach. Percussion and rhythm don’t carry much emotion by themselves, just a sense of energy and movement. I stripped out the melodic instruments entirely; built an underscore with just rhythmic textures and a single (tonic) pitch. When the player takes dramatic action, I comment by introducing melody and harmony – emotion.
Another issue I discovered is how quickly the “mix” fills up in-game; ambient sounds, engine sounds, enemies attacking you, obstacles whizzing by and music all playing at the same time. This buries the ambience completely – wind, insects, animal sounds. Ambience serves almost no gameplay purpose, except to ground you in the world. But having grown up with adventure games like MystandIco, I value these sounds highly and don’t want them lost.
PROBLEM + PROBLEM = SOLUTION
I needed neutral music and I’ve got buried ambience. The answer to both, musical ambience. I’ve incorporated environmental sounds into the rhythmic texture for each level’s backing theme. The music now feels connected to the place it’s scoring, still serves the gameplay, and provides a neutral base that pivots harmonically with the player’s actions. And I don’t have to worry about the mix as much. That, friends, is how I murdered two avian friend-beasts in the most primal way imaginable. I don’t even know where this rock came from… I… hello?
Check out the video you probably already watched for some quick examples!
When the camera in a game is done well everything feels just right, everything just flows. It’s the reason why Journey, why Inside, why Mario Kart 8, and just about every Nintendo game feels just as if anyone could play them.
Knowing how to deal with the eye not only helps you make your game more accessible but it also makes it easier to follow in the most hectic of moments.
From: PlayDead’s INSIDE
My goal: Is to explain how to design the game around the eye’s limitations and create experiences that are more comfortable for our users. I will start with the simple yet effective concept of Eye-Tracing.
An example:
From: Mad Max Fury Road
Follow the red circle: We can immediately read where the motorcycle is between shots and we see the barrel on the shotgun, each shot takes less than a second, yet we read every beat, and that’s because the eye is directed so well here.
Eye tracing is an editing technique used to direct where the eyes of a viewer will be across several shots, in other words it’s strategically moving the eyes of your player to a specific point in the screen and using it in different fun ways.
Create an environment in which you know which part of the frame your player is most likely to be looking at, this can be performed a number of ways but I wont get in the details of composition, color theory, photography or animation. I will only talk about the eyes.
Now, how does something from cinema world, a world where everything is scripted, and there’s a cut every 5 seconds or so apply to an interactive medium? Well the answer is simple it does so in a completely different way.
I will jump back and forth between games and movies but this is a game focused article.
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Do Your Eyes Follow?
What does the player see? What do you as a creator want them to see?
Do those 2 align? Can they?
Eyes have a 5 degree central vision, this is where we read books, if our target moves outside of the near-peripheral section of our eyesight the eyes will have to change positions.
TVs tend to hang in the mid peripheral, it feels as if it covers the whole vision but it really doesn’t. Close one eye and make a frame with your hands observe how much your monitor or your TV takes of your vision space.
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My rules are:
Screen Is A Plane Not A Window.
Eyes Are Slow.
Eyes Need A Home.
Up And Down Before Left And Right.
One Thing At A Time.
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The Screen Is A Plane Not A Window
The screen is a flat surface, not a window to another world.
The key word here is Planar space! This is the basis of eye tracing, and designing moving media in a way that is easy to read for people. Even 3D movies need to compose in planar space.
Maintaining the focus in a slowly moving point in planar space makes it easier on the eyes because your eyes have to move way less.
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Eyes need a home
Even when there’s nothing to be seen, the eyes should be directed to a point on the screen.
From:Mario Kart 8
In hectic game-play, having one direct point to return to is imperative as it makes the gives the eyes a simple point to return to as they jump from object to object during the action.
In games like Mario Kart the player doesn’t have to worry where the character is, but where the obstacles are.
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Eyes Are Slow
Eyes are freaking slow, if you bring motion to a target and this target moves too fast the eye will unhook from it, this occurs because of something called Saccadic Masking a mechanism in our brain that removes all the blur we should have in our eyesight and replaces it with point 2 in an image.
This means things on the screen need to move at a slow pace but not in any space but in planar space, remember the first rule The Screen Is A Plane Not A Window, as long as the characters move slowly through planar space the characters will be easy to follow, we are aiding the player to follow the character by moving it as little as possible.
If something moves slowly across the screen the eye has an easier time reading it.
if you move something too quickly the eye gets lost.
For example this is easy to follow by the eye.
This isn’t.
From: Playstation All-Stars
Now on this.
From: Super Smash Brother’s Ultimate
Unlike PlayStation All-Stars, Super Smash Brother’s camera is designed around the philosophy of making the action as easy to follow as possible.
Game camera attempts to make the characters move smoothly through planar space, it will even sometimes hook characters if they don’t move for a bit.
This philosophy means everything, this philosophy created this marvel of technical prowess. Regardless of how it was engineered the camera in Smash Brother’s is superbly created.
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Up And Down Before Left And Right
It’s easier for the eyes to follow vertical motion than horizontal motion.
This is why magazines design text in small columns, and entire languages are designed to be read vertically. Eyes find moving up and down more comfortable.
(Read on a large screen)
Up and down.
Left and right.
This also helped Journey’s devs to create a smoother camera that otherwise would have wobbled inelegantly.
Vertical motion will still cause Saccadic masking if motion is too fast, vertical motion just happens to be slightly more comfortable to follow than horizontal motion.
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One Thing At A Time
One thing at a time, and only one thing at a time.
I’m not going against the laws of composition nor framing, you can do amazing things with multiple characters, and crowds. This rule here talks about how even in highly composed shots we still only see one face at a time, one item at a time, or one enemy at a time.
Eyes can only see one thing at a time. Crazy huh? You have to literally stop looking at one thing to look at another. Hell it’s even scientificallyprovenwecan’tmultitask. So don’t force people in your supposed-to-be-entertainment product to attempt things that we aren’t biologically designed to do (unless it’s multiplayer, or if you figure it out, who am I to stop you).
From: Super Mario Odyssey
Make sure that if something is happening on the screen that only one thing is happening that requires the player’s full attention, now this may go against the idea of action game-play for a lot of people, specially in games with a lot of AI going at you, this is easily remedied by having only one AI attack at once, think, and ask yourself the question, What is the main focus at this very moment? and make it immediately readable. Yes, even if it’s outside the screen.
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Solutions
I will give some solutions to improve your game on the engineering side.
1) Create the camera system backwards.
Engineer the camera system to respect the points in planar space first and thencalculate to it.
2) If you know where the eye is, use it.
Dynamically determine where the eye is right before the next shot, or right before elements are to be displayed.
We can create things that only games can do, we can dynamically adjust the camera, the next shot, or item position for our users.
3) Guide the eye.
It’s your job to guide the eye, figure out ways in which you can do it the most effectively.
Things like the opening in Journey are just brilliant. The eye follows the character to the top of a hill just to bring an even bigger from the horizon.
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The Future
I hope this gives people an understanding of how the eye works in games and helps us understand the one issue that I think plagues entertainment software the most, we think of the camera as a dual state either it is a “Game Camera” or a “Movie Camera”, that just has to stop, I think we can embrace cutting and create something that is neither Game nor Movie camera.
With a better understanding on how to handle eye-tracing we can do things film can’t even imagine, so I hope this article helps you learn something I noticed. And helps you realize that one thing that only your game can do that will blow us all away.
The Moon is normally seen in subtle shades of grey or gold. But small, measurable color differences have been greatly exaggerated to make this telescopic, multicoloured, moonscape captured during a full moon. The different colors are recognized to correspond to differences in the surface’s chemical makeup. Blue hues reveal titanium rich areas while orange and purple colors show regions relatively poor in titanium and iron. The familiar Sea of Tranquility, or Mare Tranquillitatis, is the blue area toward the upper right. White lines radiate across the orange-hued southern lunar highlands from the ray-crater Tycho at bottom right. This image is made up of 272 different images!
I’m would like to share two of my more frequently used sites. These sites focus on logical fallacies and cognitive bias. These are common habits/perceptions individuals have that are counterproductive and even toxic. By being aware and educating ourselves on these things, hopefully we can better communicate and understand each other.
These sites are very user friendly and I very much appreciate its simplicity considering my struggle with long textbook explanations and articles. Also, I am an idiot.
PHOTO - “Time Slice” Iconic buildings and monuments photographed over time by Richard Silver. Silver shoots some 36 photos at intervals over several hours and then layers them into a final composition l Via Colossal. [1- Colosseum, Rome, Italy l 2- London, England l 3- Suleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey l 4- Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey l 5- Tongariki Easter Island Sunset l 6- Birds Nest, Beijing, China]
