Reading
this Gamasutra interview with the designer of Portal reminded me of Michael comparing games to paintings:
Once we figure out what puzzle we're going to build, we want to then kind of whitebox it and make sure that it plays right. Then we rearrange the room compositionally so that way... I call it "design compositions."
Instead of it being like a painting where everything is still, you want to use things like motion, lighting cues -- not only lighting but the shadows too. As you can see [playing the demo] our window shadows are actually pointing, literally, at stuff. So figuring out a good lighting composition for the level, as well as detail.
So if you compose a scene where there's a bunch of detail in one area, players tend to just look at that. So just using a lot of psychological cues that you would use composing a painting, and doing a scene like that for a video game.
Can we go back to design composition a bit? I found that really interesting, as far as visual cues and making a player go where you want them to go.
KS: It's composing a scene like you would for a painting. So let's say I have a basic room [Swift sketches on paper] and I want the player to go here, right? So what I want to do as far as geometry is, let's say, let's have these walls curve in, because it's going to lead your eye along this line here. And you can see, we've done that quite a bit with our curves and angles.
It's not just because they're just quirky and fun, they actually help point and compose the scene where we want you to look. So in the case of, say, this image here, we wanted you to look at the image of Professor Quadwrangle. We wanted you to look at all the stuff over there in the corner, and we also wanted you to look at the ledge up there too.
So as you're coming in this room, I immediately want you to look at the right. Even though there's important stuff to the left, I want you to look at the right. So the way I lit this particular scene is because there's two windows up here on the side, I wanted you to look off to the right. So I made sure to use a light that cast at kind of an extreme angle, because that tends to look the best.
It's creating an effect where it's kind of leading you with the lights.
KS: Exactly. So not only are you lighting this space because you want to cast light in that area -- because lighter spaces, people are attracted to something that's light as opposed to dark. And then in addition to that, I'm using the negative space of the window itself to basically be an arrow that says, hey! Look over here!
I would have never noticed that.
KS: Mm-hmm. But it's those little subtle things that people don't really notice. But once you look at it from a compositional standpoint, that's what's going on.
