The elements and principles of design are used often in photography but are also important in video games. Video games need to be visually appealing, while also fitting a certain theme. Most successful games use these elements well, from online first-person shooters to story driven masterpieces. These games might contrast but will still use the elements and principles of design. “Moore, Chris. “pl_badwater0102.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 14 Oct. 2008, www.flickr.com/photos/crypticon/2940555190/.” Team Fortress 2 is one of the oldest and most popular FPS games of all time. The reason for its popularity was its accessibility, its unique characters, and its art style. You can make a case for all the elements and principles being in this image, but some appear more clearly than others. Blue really helps the checkpoint stand out and be more visible to the players (compared to the bland grey environment), the contrast of the two team colors of red and blue help create a sense of rivalry and competition between the two. The visible proximity of the weapon you are in possession of and the environment you are in on screen helps to determine the importance of what you are holding. Shape is also used to create an unnatural, industrial feel using your weapon, the checkpoint, and the un-even construction of buildings. One complaint I have is that there could be more use of colors (even though it’s supposed to be bland, I feel like there could still be more variety between tones) in the image. There could also be more use of alignment, so that more items and areas seem more related than one giant heap of grey and brown. “Othree. “Super Mario Odyssey.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 29 Dec. 2017, www.flickr.com/photos/othree/38493690805.” Super Mario Odyssey is another super popular story game that had its 1-year anniversary on October 27th. This game also has most if not all design elements and principles present. The Purple Moon really stands out from the sand. The size of the ball compared to Mario makes it seem like an important object. Proximity is also used to show the importance of the current objective in the image (the volley ball game) from the other people and objects in the background. An issue I do have with this image is that the sand and the color used for the counter are way to similar.
In summary:
Othree. “Super Mario Odyssey.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 29 Dec. 2017, www.flickr.com/photos/othree/38493690805. Moore, Chris. “pl_badwater0102.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 14 Oct. 2008, www.flickr.com/photos/crypticon/2940555190/.
0 Comments
Most people who play video games know what indie games are. There have been a lot of largely popular indie games that have hit the spotlight such as Undertale, Cup Head, and Super Meat Boy. Indie games, for those who don’t know, are games made independently, or without funding from a publishing company. Even though some indie games becoming super popular, occurrences like this are not very common. Because indie games don’t get funding from publishers, they not only don’t have much money to work with in terms of making the games themselves, they also don’t have any money for advertising. The only people who really know about future indie game releases are people who browse crowd funding websites and people who follow known indie game developers on social media. With so little exposure for new developers, being successful is difficult. The main way that indie developers get popular are through YouTubers. Indie game developers will sometimes pay large YouTubers to play their games, or if they get lucky a large Youtuber will play their game without the developer reaching out. These Youtubers can increase the awareness of an indie game by a significant margin. YouTube has been a large part of popularization of games, but indie games is probably by far the most important. Undertale, probably the most notable example (I’m not considering Minecraft for this post) of popularization through YouTube. Undertale acquired a very large amount of funding after the original demo for the game was released on its Kickstarter page, and got over 10x the amount of money it was trying to raise. It also gained exposure after its release when Youtubers began to play the full game and experience its possibilities. Other indie games have achieved this, but there are still hundreds of well-made indie games out there that never struck this perfect formula. It’s a shame that this is the case, but hopefully more indie games will get recognized and popularized in the future.
Works Cited:
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege is the most recent (2015) release in the Rainbow Six series of games based on Tom Clancy’s book “Rainbow Six”. Rainbow Six: Siege was intended to put online into the realistic shooter series, and has done relatively well, with it still constantly being updated and even developing a large esports fanbase. This doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have its fair share of issues, though. One issue came not with gameplay, but with the characters and their abilities. With a large amount of selectable characters, it might be a little difficult for the developers to keep it original when they decide to add new characters. This has led to some newer characters to be “less realistic” and ruin the “aesthetic” of the game. A few examples include the Operation Chimera update, which added the two characters Lion and Finka. Lion had the ability to detect defending players that were in motion, and Finka had the ability to give her teammates a boost in speed, health, etc. It is true that the game was originally intended to be realistic, but there are a lot of fine details that would not have been overlooked if realism was the focus of the game. The best example is the original operators that were released in the first place, with Jaeger’s Active Defense Systems and Hibana’s X-Kairo pellets. But a rebuttal to that is those gadgets seem like they could be developed within the coming years. Whichever side you take in this debate, possible, or not, the game is still very fun and interesting. The realism of the operators shouldn’t affect the actual gameplay, even if it’s obvious that the operator is doing something currently impossible. I feel like this debate is just pushing the community apart and is just another excuse to be mad at the developers. If the developers would come out and address this debate, I feel like the community would complain less about minor details and more about issues that need to be fixed.
Works cited:
Colors are more than just something pretty to look at- they can invoke feelings and set tones that can really affect many situations. Different colors create different feelings, each one with multiple different positive and/or negative feelings associated with them. That’s the reason that fast food restaurants may use colors like red and yellow to make people feel hungry, or royalty in shows and movies be represented with purple. Video games will use colors in this way too. Games will use different colors to set moods and make the player feel things like fear or accomplishment. One game that I like to play is called “Geometry Dash”. In this game, players can play levels created other players, or “creators”. These creators have a plethora of different objects they can use to make the hardest, most fun, or best-looking levels they can. These creators also have access to a very large amount of colors as well. One level can contain an infinite amount of colors and color combinations, on top of the large number of available objects. These levels will often have themes, and this is especially present in the most difficult levels in the game. Levels created purely to be difficult will most commonly have a blood red “hell” sort of theme, present in famous levels such as Bloodlust, Crimson Planet, and Yatagarasu. This theme of a dark red and black creates a general sense of fear in the player, cementing the idea that the given level should not be taken lightly. A segment form the Geometry Dash level Bloodlust; image used from the Geometry Dash fan-wiki This is not the only present theme in these levels, though. There are sometimes themes like a futuristic blue, or a more gray-scale atmosphere. But that’s just for the hardest of levels. The different possibilities of themes and diverse ways players can use them make this game interesting.
In summary:
Citations: “Bloodlust.” Geometry Dash Fan Wiki, geometry-dash-fan.wikia.com/wiki/Bloodlust. Stadust. “#1 - Bloodlust.” Pointercrate, www.pointercrate.com/demonlist/1/. |
Author
Archives
May 2022
Categories
All
|