Artistic Styles

Level 3 Games Design

Unit - 78 : Digital Graphics for Computer Games

Artistic Styles

Photo Realism - An artistic style used to show things that look real however are actually not. Hence Photo Realism-- Realistic Photo. 

GTA V was released in 2013 and did an excellent job of showing photo realism.

GTA V Made players actually feel like they were immersed in a world of crime and that you shouldn't trust anyone as they could pull a gun or do a run. Actually being able to call the NPC's human really shows how photo-realistic GTA V is.

Abstraction - An artistic style that consists of just shapes of random (non)polygons and many different colours. Pablo Picasso was known for abstract art work such as 'The Weeping Women'.

Tetris was released in 1984 and would be a great example of abstraction.

Tetris really showed players back 'in the day' how games are good things to keep you occupied being one of the first games made, Tetris was fun because of its abstract blocks that you must place down in the smartest place to ensure you can proceed further without touching the top of your screen!

Pixel Art - An artistic style consisting of squares put together at a small scale.

An example of Pixel art is Pokemon Red. It was released in 1996 and was made for the game-boy

Pokemon Red was one of the first games that kids enjoyed playing with a good story that was easy to follow on with. It used sprites with different animations to show the direction the way they would face. This game was pixelated so immersion wasn't very good however players enjoyed the game for it's challenging battles and great story line.

Exaggeration - An artistic style that-- hence the title, over exaggerates things. These can include stuff like hair on characters, swords, jaw lines etc.

An Example of Exaggeration could be final fantasy 7 which uses the anime/manga art style for the characters which uses exaggerated swords, chins, eyes and other facial features you wouldn't see naturally on a human.

Final fantasy 7 was released in 1997 and was the first in the series to show 3D gameplay, Previous games had also shown the anime art style however Final Fantasy 7 showed it the best. The game gave a great immersion with it being the first 3D game in the series and it's animations added.