But the effect is pretty great,” Oyzon says. “Of course, Joy will kill you eventually. If you choose to take your Joy, the brighter-than-realistic color palette returns. The protagonist slips into sadness and the colors on the screen become dark and monochromatic. It’s a big-brother-is-watching world where the well-heeled take a drug called Joy that gives a feeling of bliss instead of the dread and paranoia resulting from all the creepiness and violence surrounding them. The game is set in an alternate, dystopian reality in England in the 1960s. We asked Oyzon and Stephens to pick a few of their favorite light and color effects in video games. It all comes back to how the designer wants the player to feel.” Those are all things designers play with.
High contrast settings or those with more effuse light indicate threat. “Different times of day feel differently,” Oyzon says. Those artistic touches make games immersive, Oyzon says. What would horror-survival games, such as Resident Evil or Dead Space series, be without all of those shadows to conceal monsters or flickering lights to reveal them? How many modern games classics, such as The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and countless others, feature constantly changing light conditions thanks to a full day/night cycle? Light and color selections are only part of game design, but they are some of the most important tools for making worlds atmospheric and setting a vibe. They and their colleagues at the School of Interactive Games and Media teach every aspect of game design, including how to program game-play mechanics and how incorporating techniques from film, photography, theater, animation, and the rest of the arts makes games more vibrant. Oyzon and Stephen Jacobs teach students how to make video games as professors at Rochester Institute of Technology.
“They came up with something pretty gorgeous.”
“While the imagery in Myst is pretty static, and the graphics of the time were pretty limited, the designers made very deliberate choices about light and color,” Oyzon says. How did Myst become a bestseller? By making the world feel real, says Elouise Oyzon, an expert in game design. There were no enemies to fight or even characters to talk to. Myst had to visually arrest because, other than completing puzzles, there wasn’t much for players to do other than to take in the scenery. Set on a picturesque and mysterious island, The Stranger wanders the world, completing puzzles and unlocking locations filled with heavy fog or shadows or bright sunlight reflecting off of the rippling water. It’s easy to forget how beautiful the world of Myst looked when Cyan published the game in 1993.
0 kommentar(er)
