2.6 Art and Sound

(Due: Dec 5 Status: Not Completed)

2.6 Art and Sound

1. Game art and sound are incredibly important to storytelling, but they are also elements that will generally be largely or completely out of your control as a writer. You need to understand the basics, but you also need to be able to let go when, for example, a character you’d written as interesting and independent gets animated with a D-cup and a 30 inch waist, stuffed into a chain mail bikini.

2. There are a few different kinds of game art, defined by how they are created by artists and presented to the player, and a nearly infinite range of different styles can be applied to each kind of art.

a. Pixel/Sprite Art: for a long time, the maximum resolution supported by computers and game systems was less then the resolution of the eye: thus, everything appeared more-or-less pixilated, made up of discrete dots or, mainly, rectangles of color. “Sprites” are 2d images made up of collections of pixels, normally designed and “drawn” pixel by pixel by an artist. Pixel/Sprite Art is frequently used in “retro” games and independent games (because it is a lot less work than full 3d rendering).

b. “Hand Drawn” Art: Properly, this is pixel art without the pixels: many games make use of 2d art that is scanned in or created with software: the computer stores it as pixels, but the pixels are smaller than the naked eye can perceive. 3d games use 2d art on a regular basis (including in-game posters and banners, books, computer games, loading screens, etc.).

c. Vector Art: mathematically generated and infinitely scalable, vector art is the 2d ancestor of 3d rendering. Now used mainly in indie games, such as the popular Geometry Wars series.

d. 3d Art: created, rendered and stored in memory as a 3d model, 3d art allows for changes in perspective and scale. 3d models are generated by a design team and then animated into action like a digital version of stop-motion animation (claymation). Advances in 3d rendering and computer processing power drove the rise of the FPS game, and today almost all big-budget games by major companies are 3d-rendered.

3. It may be hard for gamers who grew up with fully-voiced games with movie-quality scores to picture, but sound long lagged behind visual advances in games. Modern highly-compressed audio formats require a lot of processor power, and, especially prior to CD-Rom, high quality sound took up a prohibitive amount of space. Advances in sound have presented new difficulties (good dialogue can be ruined by bad voice acting), and highlighted old ones (even a good score will get looped over and over until it becomes boring in any long-playing game).

4. Games Extra: Read Game Writing Chapter 12, “Adding Magic – The Voice Actors” I also recommend that you look at Chapter 11, “Beware of the Localization”