Graphics Specification

Visual Styles:

Cell Shading is giving an object or character to look like a comic book or hand drawing book. This can be used to give flat colour to have an impression on character or an object. The cell shading can use lighting to have effect on dynamic atmosphere of the mood. Also shading to give it drawing theme to it. For example ‘Naruto Ninja Storm 4’, and new ‘Dragonball Xenoverse’.

Abstraction is the opposite of photorealism, as it does not look realistic. Abstraction can be used to stand out. Some of the object may have resembles to other objects. It usually using game that colourful. This can be used in PG 6 games like ‘SUBRAY’. As it can look friendly. The abstraction use a colourful colours to set feeling calm and exploration. Or on other times it can be used to make game grim and brutal, like ‘Super Meat Boy’. It uses a sharp and hard objects, as it gives a brutal mood to the player.

Exaggeration is mostly used in RPG (Role Playing Game). This can give a fantasy mood in the game. The exaggeration is used by games that is influenced by Comics, Cartoons and Animes. For example ‘Batman Arkham Knight’, the main character has over exaggerated muscles. Also ‘Final Fantasy 7 Remake’, and again the main character has a ridiculously large sword.

Photorealism is term used to make game to make realistic as much. This can be used to make game look as much as the real world. This used in ‘The Last of Us’ and ‘Ghost Recon: Wildlands’. Most Photorealism games are mostly seen in action, horror, survival, and shooter game.

Pixel styled games use chuck, 8 bit graphics. It uses a similar style from 1980s games. Creating a Pixel art is user to create, rather than doing 3D, 64 bit games. Which will take less time to develop. This is used in ’The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth’. They use it as a brutal game as main character has to survive through the dungeons. Using the 8 Bit to give it a brutal atmosphere. Or it can be used to give friendlier feel to it – like ‘Terraria’.

Typography:

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point size, line length, line-spacing (leading), letter-spacing (tracking), and adjusting the space within letters pairs (kerning).

Technical Stuff:

They are to go type of formats good for different uses in computer game graphics. Such as JPEG and PNG.

JPEG compresses the best for photographs and images with no sharp borders. However, your images will have degraded quality because JPEG uses lossy compression (you can fine tune the compression level/degradation when exporting images as JPEG. Refer to your imaging software's documentation for more information on this).

However, as good as JPEG may be, it doesn't support transparency. This is crucial if you want to have images that show through others, or if you want images with irregular shapes. GIF is a good choice, but it has been largely superseded by PNG (there's only a few things GIF supports that PNG doesn't, but they're largely irrelevant in game programming).

PNG supports transparency (and semitransparency), compresses data without degradation in quality (i.e. it uses lossless compression), and compresses fairly well, but not as much as JPG.

Composition:

Composition is all about placement across all forms of art (Media, Film, Video games). The rule of the third is a useful tool to learn about composition, you draw a three by three grid and where the lines of this grid meet shows you where to place things to make them visually appealing to the eye.