Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

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FOR
a game to be competitive these days, its game environment must be
visually enthralling. We want to connect the player’s emotions to
the play via their eyeballs and their twitchy fingers (or even their not-so-twitchy fingers
for slower-paced games steeped with character building, resource management,
or environmental exploration filled with clues and cues). However, a visually enthralling
game environment is so much more than just eye candy or sweet visuals. Eye
candy is just that … momentarily sweet, but ultimately unfulfilling. The best use of visuals
in games supports interesting and meaningful gameplay. During the time we have
a player’s attention, we want to grab hold of their emotions. We want to provide new
levels of excitement and “connectedness.” We can do this in several ways, often depending
on the specific emotional experience we’re trying to transfer: panic, confusion,
impending doom, wonder, and so forth.
Is it possible to have great gameplay that is perfectly satisfying without utilizing
state-of-the-art graphics technology? Of course it is. Many great games reduce to
simple yet addictive actions or motivations. (Shoot that thing before it eats you and
survive!) However, when games call for rich environmental immersion, we want to
deliver in that area as well. We want to melt the player with mood. Mood transfers
emotional cues.
From an environmental design standpoint, some of the most powerful weapons in
your mood-altering armory are lighting, texturing, particles, effects, and audio. The
application to games of each of these elements continues to evolve with technology.
We need to try to keep pace, remembering all the while that we’re trying to build on
shifting sands.
Each of these elements—lighting, texturing, particles, effects, and audio—can be
studied in great detail in its own right. We’re going to survey the use of these elements
as they apply to building up game environments. Most importantly, we need to understand
their use at the conceptual level so that, no matter how they evolve, we understand
their application in principle, enabling us always to build better games. In this chapter,
we will survey and explore each of these areas with our goal clearly in sight—to
understand how these elements are used to create mood, which in turn supports
gameplay.