The Best Power Is The Power You Missed

Gaining power is a typical feature in games.

 Collecting more powerful equipment and learning utilitarian new techniques are obvious examples, but this concept shows up in many forms. Less obvious examples are additional inventory space or access to new areas. I have no doubt you can come up with many other examples.

I think we can all agree it feels great to pick up that rocket launcher a few moments before facing the next boss enemy. What could be better?

Yes, please.

But, wouldn't you also say finding that rocket launcher would have felt just a little bit sweeter if you could have missed it...but didn't?

I think a lot of players would agree. Maybe even most players, if I had to guess. But, a few of you might be wondering "What difference would that make?"

The reason it feels so much better to gain power you could have missed is the relativity involved. If your game is feeding you a steady and constant stream of increased power and it consistently follows this up with a challenge that's just a bit tougher than the last thing you had to face...what's the difference? You got stronger and the enemy got stronger, so aside from the aesthetics...aren't you right where you left off?

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a great game, but players were disappointed that monsters everywhere in the game would scale in power along with the player character's level. 

Now, this approach isn't completely worthless of course. There's a lot to be said for aesthetics (I should know, I'm an artist.) And, of course, there are a lot of creative ways to challenge and reward the player. But, if you can gain optional power, power you could have missed, power others did miss, now you're growing on a curve...maybe a different curve than your enemies, even. We are talking exponential growth. Maybe your enemies can't even keep up.

Now that's real success and real success feels good.

Tunnel Vision in Game Art

We (that is, artists in general) typically come into games with a soloist mind set. This is cultivated from our time as amatuers, where most of us seem to have been producing art by our lonesome, where we have immediate control and visibility over all elements of our work at once.

This entirely reasonable trend among amatuers a might change as game development is increasingly more accessible, thanks to readily available software like construct, unity, and unreal. Only time will tell.

But, once we enter into game development we typically join a team of artists, wherein we specialize in producing art for a specific family of assets; characters, environments, etc. At this point we tend to fight the same old battles we've always fought at this point, throwing our entire bag of tricks at any particular task set in front of us. When an entire team does this without considering their art's place among everyone else's assets, the final look of the game comes together looking like a mess. It is akin to every musician in an orchestra trying to play the entire score.

Of course, this can happen even if it's the project of a single artist, since you will be working on a variety of disparate assets which will only later be seen together. However, the team based nature of most game development only further lends itself to this problem of tunnel vision.

Its crucial to remember that each asset must work in concert with all the others, just as certain hues and values are regulated to certain areas of a single illustration to produce harmony.

For art leadership, it is especially important to be aware of this type of tunnel vision both in your own work and in the work of your teammates. Although it is valuable for everyone on the team to recognize this concept, it is ultimately the leadership's responsibility to coordinate everything.

The principle can be sumed up thusly:

The entire screen of a video game is the illustration, not any particular asset.

Understanding 2D Camera Work In Games

Super Mario World camera system

Here's an interesting write up on a topic I must admit I have largely taken for granted. Although I have not read through the entire thing, I already find it interesting enough that I think it merit's sharing.

Working on my game Mushroom 11, I was faced with many different design and technology challenges. I wasn't expecting to find references to issues like dynamically changing shapes or vertex animation, but I was quite surprised that camera work, a subject with more than 30 years of history in games, was hardly discussed.

For those of you interested in game design, or art in games, I think it's an excellent read and I appreciate the effort put into understanding these subtleties.