Video Game Design

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ThatGameCompany's Flower title for the Playstation 3 uses the basic element of texture effectively. The game presents highly-detailed environments that immerse the player in a natural world away from civilization. Players control the wind and sweep through meadows, fields, and other landscapes. The objective is to blow off flower petals, gathering enough to revive "dead" land patches. The designer used texture to replicate the natural environments. From the image, you can already see the individual blades of grass and the organic shapes of the flower petals. This type of texture is optical, not tactile. In other words, it is only simulated visually, not physically. In addition, the grass's texture provides a depth cue. You can see a "texture gradient" the grass diminishes into the distance. It gets blurrier and darker, creating an illusion of receding perspective. The texture provides a beautiful detail to the game and gives it a realistic touch. It refers to the grass's composition as it looks green and thin just like real blades of grass. This fake illusion is purely a visual, stunning experience for its players.


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Shadow of the Colossus by Sony Computer Entertainment Company is based completely on scale. For the majority of the game, players control a young man who must defeat colossal creatures in order to save his loved one. The giants tower over the boy and his horse. As is the requirement of scale, the hero and the giants are constantly juxtaposed to each other. The players find themselves facing the giants head to head. They stand dozens of times taller than the human, blocking out the sun. They are truly larger than life and seem impossible to defeat because of their sheer size. The giants make the players feel small and insignificant, as opposed to other games where the enemies are usually about the same size or smaller than the human. Each giant becomes a puzzle in themselves as we must figure out a way to climb up them and attack their weak points without getting harmed.


image source: http://www.gameguru.in/images/echochrome-1.jpg

Echochrome is a game developed by Japan Studio and is almost entirely derived upon the element of dimension. The object of the game is to maneuver around a three-dimensional puzzle using only camera angles and getting your mannequin-like character to the spots where dark blurry human figures are, as shown in the image. The puzzles are made entirely of line (another element), and solving them requires rotating the camera perspective around to allow the walking mannequin to continue on its path. Physics depends on illusion. Players have to create the illusion that the figure will fall onto the platform below or use perspective to block a gap in order to to keep on walking. The type of perspective used is linear, making the two-dimensional appear three-dimensional. The simple, converging lines look like solid objects because of the linear perspective.