Unit 78: Digital Graphics for Computer Games

HA2 Task 02 Game Evaluation

Play the Mekka Hornet game level. Review its inspiration and evaluate its effectiveness.

Remember that you are trying to generate thoroughly thought through concept art ideas for computer game graphics and apply project management techniques to direct a project, showing creativity and flair and working independently to professional expectations.

This provides evidence for Unit 78 – P2, M2, D2

The game genre is a top down shooter much like a mild bullet hell. The art style is quite retro and the colours are quite murky and dull. The music is quite tense as there are bullets flying everywhere. It is quite futuristic as there are Robot enemies that are in your path. The game is like a typical top down shooter like 1942 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) where you can pick up power ups to increase your fire power. The art style reminds me of another NES game Gradius, both are futuristic and they look similar in some ways, the main difference between then though is that Gradius is a Side Scrolling shooter where as Mekka Hornet Rebuild is a top down shooter. The controls need tweaking in my opinion, if the aim is to create a bullet hell type game the controls have to been tight as if there is a lot of floatiness its quite hard to move precisely which is needed in bullet hell games like Ikaruga.

My gut reaction was that this game is easy to understand and it eases you in a little bit by sending weak enemies first and the harder enemies later, I think that the target is audience is people who are already fans of the SHMUP (shoot em’ up) games as the difficulty ramps up considerably throughout the level. The game is quite engaging even though is only a single level and a single boss, the boss has you memorising its attack patterns to survive long enough to attack it. The sprites on all of the things are quite detailed and good to look at.

HA2 Task 01 - Schedule

Complete a schedule for the project using the supplied template. This burn-down chart will help you allocate enough time for each task and hit the deadline. Your schedule will need to be reviewed and updated at least once per week.

This provides evidence for Unit 78 – P2, M2, D2

HA1 Task 3 - Graphic Types

Pixel Art: Pixel was prominently used in the early days of video games as that’s all that old videogame consoles could handle. Early games such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda were both really pixelated because they were some of the earliest games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. This style is still loved by many and games are still made using pixelated style because there is a lot that you can do with it and you can create some very details pixel art. Pixel art is sometimes created using beads

Concept art: this type of art is used in the production of video games as they give a bases of which to work of off for the art of the game, concept art is used for every piece of the game from the settings to the characters. This gives ideas on what the characters will look like. A lot of concept art is created for games, most get redone to create a different design and most of them never see the light of day.

Texture Art: this is where the look of everything comes from; the textures are placed on everything to make them look like that they are supposed to look like. Textures wrap around object to give it their look. The detail of the textures in the game are important as they make the game look like it is supposed to. Is the textures are wrong the game will look wrong.

Background Graphics: These are the graphics that the player doesn’t interact with, an example of this would be skyboxes in game like Counter Strike. These skyboxes contain the building that you can see In the background but you cannot interact with them as they are not actually there. These can be less detaild as the rest as most people would look at the action rather then the backgrounds

Print Media Art: This is items such as posters as clothing based on video games, this is very popular and there are many different types of this, other examples are lunchboxes, bags and other things. many types of art are using in Print Media as people like different styles of art.

HA1 Task 2 – Artistic Styles

Photorealism: this is an art style in which real photographs are used as a reference for a person to draw/paint it realistically. This style of art flourished in the 70’s. An example of this would be a picture is on a grid and each square is painted individually to get the most amount of detail in each part of the painting. When doing photorealistic artwork a photograph is necessary for influence as photograph can capture fine details. The artist studies the photograph with great detail to capture the life likeness of the photograph in another artistic media. This artistic style is very hard to implement in video games due to the vast amount of detail of the pictures, the detail would need a lot of processing power. Photorealism may be used in game trailers of even cutscenes but this would take a lot of money and only games with a high budget could implement this into their games.

Cel Shading: this art style is used in many video games and is applied to 3D models to make them look more like a comic book or a cartoon. This art style is used in may games like Okami, The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker, Dragon Ball Z Budokai 1/2/3, Telltale Games and many more. Cel Shading can be used as an art style for a video game to make the graphics look better in the long run, this was mostly used at the start of the 2000’s because games that looked “realistic” then don’t look good now but games like The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker still looks good.

Abstraction: this artistic style is an art style that is more focused on the simplest things such as basic shape and colours, examples of this would be Islamic Tiles, these pieces are focused on pattern and colour. Abstraction in games has been around for a long time, there are games like Tetris and bejeweled which is based on shapes and rows. Within these games the story is nearly non existent. These games are more focused on the visual styles of the games rather than the story elements.

Exageration: This art style is based on non realism, things like over the top mechanics or visuals. Most game are exaggerated as a lot of games used exaggeration to draw people into the game as it makes them stand out more. Games that are very exaggerated are game like Katamari Damacy, Any Anime Game (Dragon Ball/Z/GT or Naruto/Shipuuden.). all of these games have over the top action and story lines which are exaggerated. These are exaggerated to a point where the game isn’t to be taken seriously as the actions/visuals/sounds are so over the top.

HA1 Task 1 - Technical Glossary

Technical Glossary

VECTOR IMAGES: Vector Images are made from points, lines and paths to create either simple images or complicated pieces of work. Since they are not comprised of pixels (like raster graphics) you can scale the whole image up without losing any image quality. Vector images can be used for logos and things similar to logos as they range from size when on business cards or on billboard so the vector will not lose quality when blown up to a larger size, if you were to use raster graphics for a billboard logo the logo will look pixelated and it wouldn’t look sleek and clean as it could.

RASTER IMAGES: Raster Images are made up of pixels unlike Vector Images; the collection of pixels is called a bitmap. This type of image produces large file sizes as there are a lot of pixels. Although the file size is large there are file types that compress the file size to something more manageable. Raster Images can be scaled down and there won’t be much quality lost but Raster Images can’t be blown up due to the image become very pixelated.

THE PIXEL: The pixel in a raster image is a single little point in the image that can be only one colour, even though a pixel can only be a single colour there are so many pixels that you can see a single pixel and lots of them blend together to create a smooth looking image. Pixel stands for Picture Element.

COLOUR DEPTH: The Colour depth is the amount of bits that represent colour in a single pixel. The higher the Bit per Pixel the higher the colour variety and quality.

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COLOUR MODELS: A Colour Model is a simple way to define colours; this determines what colour appears on the computer screen. The 2 most common Colour Models are CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black) and RGB (Red Green Blue). CMYK is used for printing and RGB is used for displays/screens.

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RESOLUTION: Image Resolution is the amount of pixels a Raster image holds, the higher the pixels the higher the image detail, An image that is 2048 pixels in width and 1536 pixels in height has a total of 2048×1536 = 3,145,728 pixels or 3.1 megapixels. Mega pixel just means million and it is rounded to the nearest decimal.

ANTI-ALIASING: Anti-Aliasing makes the jagged appearance of images/video much smoother. The surrounding pixels of the jagged edge become similar colours to the line to try and smooth it out. This is used in video games to enhance the look of certain things to make it seem smoother.

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ASPECT RATIO: The Aspect ratio refers to the ratio of the width to the height of the image/screen. Every screen has an aspect ratio; the screen that this was typed on was a 4x3 screen, meaning its 4 units wide by 3 units high. 16x9 is the aspect ratio of modern HD TV’s.

FILE FORMATS - bmp, png, gif, tiff, jpg, psd, pdf, eps and ai: There are different file types that images can be stored as and most have different ways of storing images, for example the JPEG format it’s used to compress files at the cost of quality, this is mostly used for pictures where precise quality isn’t always needed. PNG keeps the original quality but its trade-off is the fact that the files can be quite large as there is no compression. PNG is an example of lossless image format where no quality is lost, JPEG is an example of Lossy image format as it compresses the file size to something more manageable.

COMPRESSION: Compression is where files are made smaller for ease of transport but the quality of the file may worsen the more the file is compressed. Lossy compression is an example of eh quality trade-off but lossless is compressed to a smaller size but when opened again it reverts to its original size and quality.

IMAGE CAPTURE DEVICES: Image capture devices are a variety of things from cameras to photocopiers; each one captures an image then output that image into some sort of media such as a computer. When a camera takes a pictures it stores it on a memory card, when a photocopier takes a picture of the thing that needs copying its send the image to the computer.

OPTIMISING: Optimising is when you get the most out of something. “To increase the computing speed and efficiency of (a program), as by rewriting instructions.”⁽¹⁾Optimising is good because it allows for the maximum use out of limited material.

STORAGE AND ASSET MANAGEMENT: “Digital asset management (DAM) consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets”⁽²⁾Storage management is important with lots of different files as they can easily get muddled up with other files if not correctly stored.

(1) http://www.thefreedictionary.com/optimising

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_asset_management

(3) http://www.build-your-own-computer.net/image-files/display-properties-03-aaexample.jpg

(4) http://www.ginifab.com/feeds/pms/images/cmyk_vs_rgb.jpg

(5) http://content.provideocoalition.com/uploads/Colour_banding_example01.png

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Task 1 - Schedule

Task 2 - Game Genre Setting and Synopsis Research

These are the Location Inspirations for my game.

These are the Games inspiration for my game and the links to the images.

Game Synopsis

Modern Ninja

This game is a stealth platformer with a focus on missions and optional missions. This is based in major cities from around the world. This games main protagonist is Kenji, a man who has followed his ambitions to bring ninjas back into the modern world and he need to prove to everyone that he has what it takes. This game follows Kenji as he takes missions and completes them which his arsenal of old and new weaponry. Conflict however is a last resort so he has to rely on his stealth abilities to traverse the landscapes and complete the level by assassinating a target or collecting intelligence. The fluidity of the missions gives you more points and in turn more respect from the higher ups and they will give you harder missions. As the game progresses you gain more abilities as you complete harder missions which help you on your course to bring ninjas back. The games end goal is to prove the effectiveness of modern ninjas and to get more ninjas into the world. Kenji works for the CIA and they have to be proven wrong as they think that ninja are a waste of time.