Types of visual styles in games

Types of visual styles in games Photorealistic There are four types of visual styles used in games, starting off with the realistic games, photorealism.

This is where games try to mimic real life, maybe not making the graphics completely like as if you was looking at it in real life but it would have the correct proportions at least. Games that show examples of this would be Battlefield and Call of Duty. Battlefield would be the more realistic in its gameplay but the visual style is still the same.

You see from this image the visual effect is very realistic.

Everything from the lighting effect and the proportion of the human playing in game.

The lighting is very dynamic with the shading and shadows, along with the reflections depending on the object it’s bouncing off.

You can see here in call of duty the aspects of humans and the environment are correct so it is photo realism however it puts less work into making it, life like, such as its lighting is nowhere near as in depth as battlefield and the whole style of the environment is more flat and lower resolution.

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Exaggerated

The next type of visual style is exaggerated, this is when you take features of a character or environment and make them very over exaggerated. Such as when you would want a strong character so you make his muscles huge like way out of proportion or if you have a female character then her hips and waist would be extra thin. Games that use this style would have more of an anime style or cartoon. Good examples of this are Batman and Tekken.

Here you can see some of the characters form Tekken. If you look at the male characters you can see the muscles are out of proportion and bigger then would be in real life.

Then if we have a look at batman arkham asylum, even just looking at batman himself as we can see in this image, his muscles and body features are larger than they should be and hence the name its exaggerated.

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Cell-Shading Cel-Shading is here you have very flat colours and it gives a very cartoony effect. When people make a game that is cell-shaded visual style orientated, they most likely will give everything a bold outline and make the colours flat and not have an extreme amount of detail or pay as much attention to making it look realistic as that is the purpose of cel-shading.

Good examples of cell-shaded games are dungeon defenders and borderlands. With a good respect for the ‘tell-tale’ games series that gives a very good name for cellshaded visual style. We can see here in borderlands everything has a distinct black outline and the colours are flat, following the rules of cell-shaded style.

The outlines of the characters and corners of elements in the game gives the cartoon effect and this is also linking it to comics and anime style of drawing, it’s designed to make things ‘pop’ out at you and makes the elements distinct from others and surroundings.

In dungeon defenders you can see here that it also follows these same rules producing the same effect; thick, bold outlines and flat colours gives this effect. The reason celshading is done is to make 3-D rendered objects almost appear to be 2D alongside trying to mimic comic books and cartoons. They achieve this by having more flat colours as explain previously by not having colour gradients, making the change in colours Sharper creating the cel-shaded look.

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Abstract Abstract is the last type of visual style, I left this till last as it is a much broader range of what it can be.

If it doesn’t fit into the other sections or its own unique style then it will most likely be abstract. This can be anything from basic shapes to 2D pixel art to unique styles. Indie developers are much more likely to use an abstract visual style as in most cases it’s easier to make and then add to game logic etc‌ or they will make up their own unique style and it will be abstract. Some games that use abstract art style is geometry dash and good old pac-man!

Here in geometry dash we can see the character is just a square and the level design is just rectangles and triangles with some squares. Very basic shapes so therefore falling under the abstract category of visual styles. This type of style is very good for making indie games and smaller games along with apps as it is only basic shapes and much quicker to make and the computer hardware needed to run it is much less so can be made for portable devices.

Here in pacman, when it was originally made in 1980 the computer hardware around was not very good, so basic games like this were great for arcade machines. It uses simple shapes and even the ghosts are not that complex and could easily be rendered in low resolutions as the pixel style of the game made it so that even in low resolution the game looked how it was intended.

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