The Visual Experience

So this blog is going to be focusing main on the aesthetic of games today and will probably be really shitty since I got a total of 2 hours of sleep last night, I'm slowly dying because I think I'm getting sick again after Halloween Haunt (it's this huge Halloween event at the amusement park near my house which my friends and I go to every year for our friend's birthday. It was cold and wet and we decided to be be really smart and go on roller-coasters as well as the mazes, which we are all paying for now) and the copious amounts of alcohol we had last night (actually it was this morning) was ridiculous (On a side note we had a drinks based on all the Eevee evolutions which were soooooo good, look them up people). Ok now enough babbling and on to my probably really sucky blog post, yeaaaaaaaah!

 

Now as a game design (or any designer really) you need to really think about the visual experience that your game aesthetics presents to the players. You need to ensure that the colors and patterns you use in your visuals work well with each other and convey the visual experience you want to create. Now you can do this be using visual reactions, which are aspects of the game aesthetics that cause reactions from the players. These reactions can be Aesthetic sensibility, Primal Reactions and Taught Reactions.

Next I'm going to briefly discuss Christopher Alexander's 15 Properties of Living Structures (I apologies it's most likely going to get really shitty in a moment cause I feel like I'm dying, also Here's more info on Christopher Alexander).

1. Levels of Scale
   
   • Telescoping goals
   • Fractal Interest Curves
   • Nested game world structures
   • Balanced range of sizes for environments, entities, challenges, and player actions
     
2. Strong Centers
   
   • Strong areas of focus or weight for environments, entities, challenges, story and characters
     
3. Boundaries
   
   • limitations for space, rules and actions
   • Are often not very clear
     
4. Alternating Repetition
   
   • repeat elements to give sense of order and harmony in environment and challenges
   • shape of tiles
   • Cycle of level/ boss/ level/ boss
   • pacing of tense/ release/ tense/ release
     
5. Positive Space
   
   • Complementary shapes
   • well-balanced game
   • backgrounds reinforce rather than detract
   • keep focus on player challenges
     
6. Good Shape
   
   • simple forms that are pleasing 
   • create powerful centers from simplicity
   • environments
   • entities
   • challenges
     
7. Local Symmetries
   
   • Small internal symmetires work best
   • better than overall symmetries
     
8. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
   
   • Looping and interconnected structures promote unity and grace
   • environments
   • story
   • challenges
     
9. Contrast
   
   • using strong opposites to achieve
   • unity
   • focus
   • emphasis
   • Between
   • opponents
   • controllable things
   • reward and punishment
     
10. Gradients
    
    • Proportional use of space and patterns to promote harmony in environments, story, and challenges
    • gradually increasing challenge curve
    • complexity of puzzles increases as game progresses
      
11. Roughness
    
    • texture and imperfection conveys uniqueness and life in environments, entities, challenges and story
    • Roughness for storytelling effects are seen in Portal 2
      
12. Echoes
    
    • a pleasing, unifying repetition
    • interest curves, fractals
    • similarities repeat in environments, challenges and story
      
13. The Void
    
    • create calm and contrast through empty spaces and pauses in challenges
    • large open spaces help focus attention on few important objects
      
14. Simplicity and Inner Calm
    
    • uses only the essentials and avoids extraneous elements
    • single, well-balanced rules
    • emergent properties
      
15. Not-Separateness
    
    • Well-connectedness of rules
    • All elements in the game are connected and complementary
    • Story revisions
    • see how your enemies are made