#disengage!

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Atmosphere in Games

I've been trying to write an article about atmosphere in video games, but the more I try the more I try the more I realise how difficult it is to put a mood into words and keeping the magic in the transition. I wanted to talk about the church in lower Midgar in Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, but I think it'd be best to find as many common elements as possible instead of being so specific.

Music

I remember watching a video with Rowan Atkinson describing how important music was to establishing tone, and how dramatically it can change a scene in films. We've been echoing the same sentiments in games for a long time, and so we should, music has an amazing ability to communicate atmosphere in an incredibly succinct way.

Actually I came across a music-related quote not too long ago that pretty much sums up how I look at games:

I start with the subject matter I want to write about. Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last.

- Midge Ure

In the same way a designer can decide on their subject matter; the story they want to tell, feeling they want to emote or a moral. Then they can create a world that elicits it and give it an atmosphere. And the world and atmosphere aren't so different, so it's important that they're done together. After that characters can come if one didn't pop their head up as step 1, as well as other world elements. This would also be where you implement gameplay.

Like Mario. The subject matter might be that anyone can be a hero. Then the world and atmosphere grow from that. In this case a light-hearted hero's tale in a fantasy world with an out of place plumber. After all if a plumber who finds himself in a fantasy world can be a hero, anyone can.

Allegory & Fiction

Allegory can be used really well. It's usually panned because more often than not it's sort of stupidly obvious and in your face. When it's done well though it can make a world feel like it has direction, or like your character's story's not like anyone elses.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

And fiction can really make or break atmosphere as well. There's an ambience to good writer's work, they don't just say something the way an ordinary person would. And that goes beyond character as well, because every character exists within this fiction that they've always existed in.

Architecture

The kind of architecture's important in creating a cohesive world and for the little things that maybe we don't notice. The usual example would be an evil character's lair. They're almost always spires and have other prominent pointy bits and tentacle-like things that make you feel uncomfortable. This sort of shape design's foundational to silhouette in character design, but we can apply the same principles here.

Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being. - Luis Barragan

Palette

Another thing we can borrow from character design. Palette can be tricky because you want the world to be cohesive but also the area to feel different. Depending on its purpose it can be a pretty dramatic jump too. Zelda games are great with this though. Their palettes feel cohesive but hues are insular enough to a particular area to really punch it through, and when you're dealing with disparate themes like fire and ice it can get tricky.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around. - Ann Beattie

Silence

Games are loud now. That's an obvious generalisation, but the more modern day or near future action games we get the more Michael Bay comes through. But silence is important. Have you ever watched a move and afterwards just sort of ruminated over it in silence for a few minutes? Or maybe the director included it right in the film, like Schindler's List or Grave of the Fireflies.

All I try to do is create an atmosphere that seems comfortable enough, that it removes tension and everyone feels free. If they feel free then behaviour happens, small moments happen and that's what ultimately works the best for me. - Barry Levinson

I hope this has been useful, but I can't say for sure that it will be. Like I said at the beginning, I've been antagonising over this post for a long time now. Hopefully you liked it though.

Our regular Disengage! schedule will be back in a couple of weeks, until then I'll be posting again next week. This is a little premature but I think we'll be taking a little break over Christmas and the New Year. Busy times and all that. But we have a pretty chunky back catalogue now. You can catch it here.

- Shaun

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Weapons in Character Design

It should be noted that when I say 'weapons' I really mean tools, in games weapons are just the most common sort of tool. That said they could be words, their bare hands, a potato masher, anything you can think of as long as that's what they primarily interact with the world with.

At any rate weapons are really important in character design for a couple of reasons:

Weapons define the actions a character can take.

Weapons are big details.

So let's go into each in detail.

Weapons define the actions a character can take

The way your character can interact with the world is an outward expression of who they are, but because what a character can do is restricted by their weapon it's incredibly important to give them the right one.

You might expect a character with a incredibly long and slender sword to use it to make elegant arcs, someone with a gigantic drill to drive it into someone with reckless abandon or a person with a wooden slingshot to jab from afar.

And you'd be right! But we can go one step further.

Because a character's weapon is an outward expression of who they are those same words can be used to describe the weapon's wielder themselves.

And that is something that holds true for every popular character.

Actually that weapon/character duality is something that war FPS' have been struggling with for a long time now. You can have the demo guy, the sniper, the squad captain and the newbie a million times over but there's very little that changes in their personality because you can't change much without causing a disconnect between them and their weapons (their intrinsically linked expression of self).

Weapons are big details

Yep, from an aesthetic stand point weapons are super important (for the reasons we've already gone through) so they need to big details. Not necessary physically large, but eye-catching. So they're things that we remember when we think of a character.

This is sort of the flip-side of the last point – instead of your weapon informing your audience of your character's personality here we have your weapon being a visual manifestation of its owner.

That means that not only is the weapon type itself (a gun, a broadsword, a shield etc.) only important, but the design of that weapon plays a huge role.

For this we can go back to our character design chops and pull out all the stops from silhouette down to small details and colour to show 'em who your character is. Long strands of tendril-like cloth? Probably elegantly evil. Lots of ornate carvings? You've got yourself someone who who tradition is important to. Bulky ridges? Sounds like a rough-and-tumble man's man.

Weapon/character duality is ridiculously important in a lot of genres, especially the likes of any based in ACTION, so I hope you got as much out of reading this post as I did from writing it.

-Shaun

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Character Design

I was going to write this post about E3; all the amazing revelations, the industry's bad case of sequelitis, how much Dead Island's going to suck – but this is what's really been prominent for me lately.

First and foremost I don't pretend to be a character design virtuoso, but they say you learn by teaching, so here goes.

There are a few things to always keep in mind when you're designing a character and they have a hierarchy that I'll out line below. Each heading should fit within every one above.

Readability

Most importantly your character has to be readable. Because this is at the top of the hierarchy every heading below it will expand upon it so let's leave it at this: The character should be instantly recognisable as whatever they are. We're talking about video games here but everything in this article can be used with character design for anything, but let's stay on target and use video ganme archtypes as examples.

A ranged non-magical character should be instantly recognisable as being a ranged non-magical character.

A magically powered melee character should be instantly recognisable as being a magically powered melee character.

A lizard-man character should be instantly recognisable as being a lizard-man character.

So where does a character start looking like, well, anything?

Silhouette

A character's silhouette is what makes them instantly recognisable as being who they are.

Capcom in particular have an impeccable eye for great character design. Let's look at a couple now.

From their silhouettes alone you can instantly tell that it's Blanka from the Street Fighter series.

Shape language is a powerful tool and here you want to use use big shapes as opposed to smaller ones that would better be left for detailing later on to communicate who this character is.

He's made up of a lot of bulging round shapes and doesn't show much negative space. This give us the impression that he's bulky so you already know that he's likely melee focused. Within fighting games you could also say that there's a good chance that he's a grappler.

His shape's punctuated with sharp spikes; his hair, his claws and the fur growing on his extremities. From the shape of these we get the sense that he's got a fiery personality, even without knowing that that's his hair or that he's beast-like. Just the notion of spikes makes us feel like he's violent, no matter whether it's his hair, a flamboyant collar or a stylish hat.

Long slender spikes could also imply decadence if they felt fragile, like royalty, however his spikes are powerfully formed and the use of strong round shapes elsewhere let us know otherwise.

Not only does his shape language tell us about how he plays and who he is but it's also used to make sure that he doesn't get lost amongst other characters. Blanka's design's great and no matter who he's fighting, even if it's someone similarly built like Sagat or Hakan you could still pick him out by his silhouette alone.

Big Details

Next up we have big details. Big details are whatever you'd see if you did a super-deformed version of the character.

Let's continue using Blanka as an example. So the first things that I recognise are:

His hair

His teeth

His physique

So if we sketched up a super-deformed version using just these features:

It's instantly obvious who it is.

He has other stuff going on that I didn't represent like the metal shackles around his ankles, his chest and leg fur and his shorts as well as his other facial features that make his seem like an animal, but we can still tell who he is just from the big details.

Colour

We have a lot of associations when it comes to colour. For example green feels like nature, blue like water or the sky, black's something evil or lonely and red can be anything ranging from anger to love, roses, blood or lust.

Some of these are culturally dictated (using what we have above as an example if you wanted to communicate lust in parts of Asia you'd use pink, which would come across as childish in the west) some are recognised worldwide and you can tell a lot about your characters with the,

  Blanka uses bright orange on spikes which really emphasises an abundance of energy or cockiness. It's also a fairly exotic colour, definitely not something you see occurring in nature everyday unless you live amongst tigers or frogs or something, so we get the sense that he's exotic and animalistic (to some degree) himself.

Then we have his green skin: Not normal. When I think of green things I think of nature (leaves, snakes, grass etc.) or toxic sludge, nuclear waster or some other product of a mad scientist's shenanigans.

Small Details

They're the least important thing when it comes to character design. Anything that you need to get across should have already been communicated by this point, so those things that I mentioned like Blanka's shackles etc. go here.

These are still important because they let you expand on the story that you've started to tell or hide information that could be revealed at a later point in a detail but they should be left as accents to whatever you already have. You can use them to guide the eye, to break up large areas to make sure you have some spaces where your eye can rest as well as spaces of interest or to expand on the narrative your already telling with your shapes.

For example if you have an armoured elf who holds a high rank in his military then even though the shapes of his armour would appear further up in the hierarchy here you could add commendation stripes, patterns or otherwise gussy it up bit, so long as you don't over do it.

In closing

We're bombarded with great characters from everyday but only when you really look at them and break them down can we see what works and why. From Kirby to Batman, if a character's become become popular it can be guaranteed that they're excellently designed.

I didn't think it was fair to post this without some of my more recent design efforts, so here's a few sketches that I've done lately.

The last 2 are still work in progress'. The Huntress needs her guards and torso worked out as well as a turn around and Jack Frost needs a better break up of areas where your eye can rest and areas with detailing. I'll keep you posted in my next post in 3 weeks time but until then the intrepid Tom and adamantium Jonno will throw down some updates in the next couple of weeks so keep your eyes peeled.

Further Reading

  Dan Paladin Character Design Videos

Alex Ahad on Character Design

Jason Chan Character Design Series Part 1

Jason Chan Character Design Series Part 2

Jason Chan Character Design Series Part 3

Kazuma Kaneko on Character Design

-Shaun

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New Year's Revolution!

Well hello! This is Tom bringing back Disengage! for the new year! I hope this year so far has been every bit as awesome and exciting as mine! Speaking of exciting, it's my job to tell you about the exciting stuff that's gonna be developing here over the year!

Now all of us here at Disengage! happened to attend the same NYE party and at said party we got to talking (as friends so often do) about how we could improve the blog. Now during this discussion an interesting point was raised. What's our 'thing?' What is it that Disengage! can do that sets them apart from all the other blogs out there. I mean we didn't even really have a 'genre' for the stuff we talked about last year. So we narrowed it down to one fairly broad umbrella but it's one we're comfortable with. We still wanted to talk about basically the same things, like music, art and video games just to name a few, so we came up with "Pop Culture."

Another thing that stemmed from this discussion was that the blog felt very 'separated' with regards to content. Each of us kept to posting about our different interests (and probably still will under the "Pop Culture" banner) and there was nothing to unite us. We were just three separate bloggers using the same website. So we came up with the idea of, while still blogging individually, we would undertake a combined project that would hopefully become the main output of the site.

We toyed with a few different ideas including making an indie video game and dabbling in film but we ended up deciding on something I'm pretty excited about. And that something is… *insert drumroll*… Disengage! the e-magazine! Now we plan this to be a monthly magazine released on Amazon's Kindle platform. Covering all of our "pop-culture" interests we are really excited about this as the nest evolution of our approach to online content. I personally believe the e-book to be an exciting medium with a lot of untapped potential in the magazine format and we plan to tap more and more of that as we go along.

The content we put online will be cut back from three times a week to once a week as a lot of our stuff will go into the magazine, but what we put on the site will hopefully be of much greater quality and will include sneak peeks at what we're planning for each months issue. We've given ourselves a six month timeline to get the first issue out mean you'll hopefully be able to get your eyes on an issue either late July or early August (an exact date will come out closer to the time).

We're really psyched about this so we hope you are too. If you have any questions or suggestions about any of this stuff please use the handy little buttons in the right side-bar to get in contact with us. So have a great week until we catch up again next time on Disengage!

-Tom