Lies Beneath

Game – Madworld

I believe this to be more at the extreme end of the style and possible more Cartoonish that I would like to include in my designs, though it is important for me to look at both ends of the spectrum to be able to gauge where I what mine to sit. The style is still undoubtedly eye catching, and someone unique I am confined to say. As I have said before, without pushing the boundaries it is hard to develop original content these days with the sheer amount of games that have been produced over the years.

Developed by Platinum Games, Madworld is a game of sheer destruction. Focusing primarily on aesthetics here, the game offers Graphic Novel style visuals with a Film Noir like colour scheme. The visuals themes are stark black and white, splashed with action words and tremendous amounts of bright red blood. The contrast between the blood and the environment only aids to make the fights look even more brutal, leaving rivers of blood running over all your surroundings.

Despite my dislike for the amount of gore I still think that looking at mad world has offered me benefits, it is interesting to see how they have created fully lit environments using only black and white, something I imagine would be very difficult. Also, I like how they have managed to create texture and material effects using the same methods.

Style Ideas

Here are a couple of style ideas I have picked out. The first being an image of the character from Saboteur in a low angle shot, strongly contrasted background to show the silhouette. It was obtained from the concept section on their website.

This second is a video teaser for a new game release Battlefield Bad Company 2. The visual style of the game itself is not like this at all but this video depicts a very interesting method. One I have encountered before, it takes multiple animations that move on separate planes, to create 3D effect.

Film Noir

Film noir was a phrase originally coiled by Nino Frank in 1946, a French film critique “who noticed the trend of how 'dark', downbeat and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films”. The term literally means “black film”. Not only because black and white was more commonly used but because it reflected the mood and underlying themes of the pictures.

Wikipedia has a surprising amount of documentation on the topic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir

The most important point is that, relatively speaking film noir is not a genre. It is more so the mood in which the film or clip is portrayed through use of camera and visual tone. “Film noirs tended to use low-key lighting schemes producing stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning.”

The dark tones of colour used are not the only thing that draws me to this visual style, but more significantly my interest is focused upon the masterful camera work. Traditionally the use of Dutch angles, low-angle shots, and wide-angle lenses or widely used.

Dutch Angle

A Dutch angle is achieved by tilting the camera off to the side so that the shot is composed with the horizon at an angle to the bottom of the frame

Low Angle

A low-angle shot is a shot from a camera positioned low on the vertical axis, often at knee height looking up.

Wide Angle

A wide angle shot will have a tendency to exaggerate perspective.
Another characteristic are that “devices of disorientation relatively common in film noir include shots of people reflected in one or more mirrors, shots through curved or frosted glass or other distorting objects”

Mirror effect

Shadows

I hope this sort of work can help influence my own, the use of shadow and light are very important in my work and this seems an appropriate parallel. Adding mood, tension and sometimes fear to the scenes will prove challenging and feel that looking at these sort of delivery methods if can achieve the best results along with a unique style.

Film – Film noir

As I mention in the previous post, Saboteur bears some resemblance to film noir, even being shot in Paris helped me come to this conclusion. A couple of other films that also share this sort of style of the top of my head are Sin City, and Resistance, linking in with the style that I found to be aesthetically pleasing within the game.

I’m not so familiar with the Film Noir style but I will have a look into it more and add a post with more technical information.

Game - The Saboteur

“Enter the seedy world of a saboteur living in a stylized 1940s Paris, where the women are sexy, the missions are epic, and the revenge is satisfying.”
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Official Website

http://www.pandemicstudios.com/thesaboteur/agegate

Due to be released soon, Pandemics ‘Saboteur’ offers the player a chance to dive into Nazi occupied Paris taking up the role of an Irish racing mechanic called Sean Devlin, seeking revenge on a Nazi officer that has destroyed his life. The game entails in a host of different espionage type missions with the help of the French Resistance and British intelligence. Set in the 1940’s the look and feel of the game is very strong to the time period, and the cultural styles show through. Similar to that of say Hitman or Assassins Creed the play style has been developed to encompass a sand box style of progression.

I bumped into this game news when browsing some of the profile websites and once I had viewed a few of the images I decided it would be great to have a look into for this project.

The idea has links to what I am doing, firstly the infiltration style of play and also the more importantly the taboo subject of which they have included in the theme of Hitler and the German Rich. How have they addressed this issue in comparison to me?

Here are a few images from the game, the visual style of the game I personally find brilliant, it’s something that has had a strong appeal to me. It could be something to attempt to emulate in my own design, incorporating muted/no colour with splashes of action colour to lift them out of the screen.

In way I think that the Grey scale and Red actually help to build a 3d Image as the eye is draw to key points rather than the image as a whole, much in the same way 3d works.

It certainly adds atmosphere to the scenes in the game, it is strange because some uses full colour and others use the noir style. Come to think of it it’s similar to what I have seen in graphic novels and feature film. For example Sin City and The Resistance, the art noir like style. I shall have to practice some drawing similar to this later in the term to get a better gauge on it.

With regard to the taboos, game gets away with using this subject of women and Nazi killing because you as the player has reason to be doing it, it not just mindless. With my game the principle is very similar, so the reassurance that taking risks to aid originality with cause can be profitable.

Video – Concept Silhouettes

As I mentioned in a previous post, silhouettes are highly used when concepting a character design. It is common to produce an array of silhouettes until you find one that suits the mood and style of your character. They don’t require a lot of work either which is a great advantage, since here is no fine detail. As the next few videos display the use of this technique, sometimes you can simply ‘blob’ down colour in a basic shape, or weld geometric shapes together like that in Team Fortress.

I hope to use this technique extensively in my designs to obtain believable, sinister designs for my characters in the game. I personally find this a highly enjoyable part of the process and it is all beneficial to my fin outcomes in FMPA2.

Video - Team fortress lines

After doing a little searching i managed to find a video of some game play as an example of my previous post.

This first video shows what the game looks like in normal colour.

This second video shows game play using only outlines, you can see how the designs are still recognisable easily without the need for colour and texture colour (apart from red and blue teams).