Retro styles & immersion (axcho )

[axcho]

I especially like sketchy paintings where you can see the brushstrokes.

Could I make a notgame with a sketchy painted style?

[Michaël Samyn]

I especially like sketchy paintings where you can see the brushstrokes.

Could I make a notgame with a sketchy painted style?

Well, I guess I'm a sort of modernist by saying this, but maybe you should try to find the equivalent of "sketchy" in whichever rendering technique you're using. In general I think we should try and find new forms of beauty in this new medium. But I'm not a purist, so I'm not radically against imitating other media, as long as it's appropriate and remains beautiful. If you're working in realtime 3D, I'd definitely recommend looking into post-process pixel shaders. You can achieve a lot of interesting effects with those. And the HLSL scripting language is not so difficult.

[God at play]

That's what I was planning on doing.  It should be a fun experiment.  I have a friend who's a genius graphics programmer, but I guess also a concept artist on the side?!  It's absurd, really.

Here's a concept he did for my epic story I've been working on for almost a year:

[Ivan]

I just remembered a game that is (was?) in development on the tigsource forums. It doesn't seem like the devlog has been updated in months, but the first video posted of it I really enjoyed. Somehow I found its style very evocative and immersive even though it's very simple. Maybe it was the music. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OqQ6-ESp4

EDIT:
I found a video of some landscape shot with a camcorder by the same user in his channel. It's interesting to see the parallels between it and the game he was working on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejsvalFW_DI

[increpare]

Damn, can't think of his name, but I spoke to him down in at the jam cambridge.  He's not actively working on it, I think, though he does some work with Alex and Rudolf on their engine, and I think he was thinking of porting it to unity down at the jam.  Ah, yes, ed ( thread here ).  I think he'd appreciate it if you'd let him know you still have interest in its existence : )  Oh wait you did.  Cool.

[axcho]

I just remembered a game that is (was?) in development on the tigsource forums. It doesn't seem like the devlog has been updated in months, but the first video posted of it I really enjoyed. Somehow I found its style very evocative and immersive even though it's very simple. Maybe it was the music. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OqQ6-ESp4

Wow, I do like how evocative and immersive it is despite the seeming crudeness of the style. It's interesting to compare with these with How Bees Work - I found the style in the video to be much more evocative, though only a few things were different, like the different ground textures and heights and the slight fog effect as objects recede into the distance.

Well, I guess I'm a sort of modernist by saying this, but maybe you should try to find the equivalent of "sketchy" in whichever rendering technique you're using. In general I think we should try and find new forms of beauty in this new medium.

Funny to hear that, coming from someone who hates pixels so much.

But I agree. My approach would not be to use some post-processing effect to mimic the appearance of sketchy painting on top of a polygonal rendering, but to replace the polygons with something entirely different. Like this.

I want to try using a probabilistic rendering technique that is not built on triangles, but on networks of connected lines and flows of particles. I just don't know how it would work yet.

[Michaël Samyn]

Well, I guess I'm a sort of modernist by saying this, but maybe you should try to find the equivalent of "sketchy" in whichever rendering technique you're using. In general I think we should try and find new forms of beauty in this new medium.

Funny to hear that, coming from someone who hates pixels so much.

I sincerely hope not. All these huge pixels that some game creators like using have nothing to do with the medium in its current stage! Yes, there was a time when the resolution of a monitor was so low that you could clearly see the edges of pixels. But that time is long over now. I have nothing against pixels. But let them be pixels! Pixels are the single units that make up the picture on a screen. And my screen has 1680 of them in a row, making each pixel smaller than a quarter of a millimeter. But the pixels in these retro games are far bigger! They are not pixels at all. They are squares or tiles (if you use the mosaic reference). They are not an intrinsic part of the medium (they only look like they are -which is the definition of kitsch in my book). Only small pixels are! Small pixels FTW! 

Also, we have always maintained that art made with computer technology does not have to be about computer technology.
Seeking for a unique aesthetic within the medium does not imply a sort of fetishistic purity for me. On the contrary. One of the computer's excellent qualities is its capacity for smoke and mirrors. Creating illusions is as much part of this technology as lighting up square blocks on a screen. I never bought the modernist "flatness" argument about painting. The canvas, the screen is not a destination. It's a point of connection.

[edclef]

Hey, I just found this thread (and forum!) from the youtube stats... I'm the Ed behind that video. It's nice to see the project mentioned like this, cos this "sketchy" feeling was a major goal. I might experiment with some postprocessing in future, although I'm not going to do any work on the engine/renderer until there's a lot more content in.

The flat block colours are the main "deliberate" part of the style.. the large texels/pixels are incidental (although deliberately consistent)  and the shoddy drawing is just lack of effort (at this stage).

Oh, and Ivan, that other video was deliberately taken as research for the project, although after the actual game video was posted.

Some day this project will get back on track... currently I'm just doing research type stuff. Like, ahem, "rural psychogeography", but maybe that's for another thread. I guess I'll post updates somewhere on here when there's something new to see..?

[Kaworu Nagisa]

@ axcho
I would say: go for it! Don't listen to Michael, he sounds really evil to me
The thing is, if you like it, if it inspires you, if you find it comfortable, it's your best choice. Who cares if it's new, old, inventive or experimental. If you like it you can make great thing out of it ^_^

@ Got at Play
It's awesome! Can you tell us more about the project? :}

[Michaël Samyn]

@ axcho
I would say: go for it! Don't listen to Michael, he sounds really evil to me

Good advice! 

[Kaworu Nagisa]

 

Wakarimashita!

[Víctor Marín]

About "brushstrokes" and graphicFX, check this game:

http://quelsolaar.com/love/screen_shots.html

I think you can still check it for free .

[Michaël Samyn]

Yes, we've been following Love for a long time. It's looks fascinating. But we were sorely disappointed when we discovered that the gameplay was about shooting each other. I guess a single person cannot be a genius in all fields.

Have you played it?
Can you play in it without doing the war stuff?

[Víctor Marín]

I have not played it for a while, but when I did mostly it was about modifying your environment to make it to your pleasure. I used to sculpt terrain around my town to make it look like a castle, or something else I had then in mind . I think you could play it just this way, and probably there are not much games that let you modify the server in real time.

[axcho]

I found a great blog post about why Heavy Rain's focus on "realism" works against it, Interactive Storytelling: What Heavy Rain Didn’t Learn from Edutainment?

That’s all to say – Stowaway succeeds where Heavy Rain  fails because it makes some space for the player’s imagination to complete the experience. Representational realism – whether it is an attempt at puppeteering the character through the controls, or an attempt at photorealism – cannot itself make a game worth playing or a story worth following. What we experience as real in a game has much more to do with the aesthetic exaggerations the developer makes in order to give a scene a certain flavor.