Often times a project will find itself very diligently filling out the bullet points in the schedule. Are folks focusing on the right things for visual impact? A visual comfort zone can be alluring to a project when there's no heart to rally around. Art departments deserve a charismatic leader knowledgeable of the intricacies of each discipline to inspire and jazz them into making remarkable things in record time, scoped and scheduled solidly to avoid crunch. Avoiding notable things, or working too deep in nuance will make a game unremarkable, which is deadly to an IP. Here are some foundations I brought to the culture of the art team to promote extra vibrancy. {Read More}

For lighting, where gameplay allowed, we melded filosophies between cinema and the classical art world. Flattering forms, giving points of interest to guide the eye, depth of shading that is readable at a glance without squinting through surface detail is invaluable. Artists making individual assets out of context have a tendency to obsess over granular details so the object stands on its own, but it will never have to. In a scene accented with shadows and, interesting specular responses, the scene as a whole is what's going to be consumed. Attention to detail is a must, but for the health of the project and its people, obsessing over stitches and microdetail is folly. Better to focus the brunt of quality to the granularity that people experience during gameplay. 

Lighting is so much more important than in last gen games. I will make amazing assets look even better... or very cheap, depending on how it's done. Lighting that not only looks accurate and plausable, but is richer and deeper than a normal tuesday. You can be realistic without falling into naturalism, and be more colorful than the strict photon simulation that comes with the engine.

In a game where magic is the main event, we needed to make a VFX splash. This game grants the user the ability to use magic in an unlimited, creative, uninhibited way. It needed to feel like it! To communicate all the different gameplay hints, iconic differences between magic types and their effects on the world, we went bold.

• Fire is hot, crackly, full of vibrance and momentum. You would most certainly put a rocket launcher to shame with a simple fire ball in our game.

• Ice needed to not just look cold. It turns the air solid, frosts over a desert within fractions of a second. Solids lose cohesion and crumble.

• Lightning is a wild expression of elemental energy. It arcs and licks at surrounding surfaces as it speeds to engulf the target with radiant energy.

• Corruption brings forth corrosive parasites that drain life from their hosts as they incubate and burst explosively to seek out a neighboring body to infest. They are whip fast, and their tendrils flail at the air hungrily as they light up the night.

• Kinesis is the stuff of black holes, particle colliders and theoretical physics. High impact, dynamically orbiting forces that rip the stones off the mountains.

• Delirium is made up of those sparks of pain and insanity that come from neural pathways ripping and lashing with untamed energy. Blue and red afterimages of migraine and a feral brain in distress.

• Necromancy. Embodies the occult energies of the undead, the viscocity and messiness of decomposing matter, with the promise of a renewal and transformation after the process is done. An enemy is afflicted and becomes a seed of un-life upon death. When he dies, a long burried corpse from a different era will soak up the necrotic residue and springs up in service to you.

• Phase is a space-time anomally forced into this plane by your raw power. Matter and energy get rent apart into vibrations that warp the air around it. It can make a body become stranded in time, become unstable in space, or even bloom into a broader event that slows time around the user. All at your behest.

These visual languages and conventions helped (among many others) to convey to the artists the feeling they should achieve in the observer's gut. At the same time, telling the player of possibilities of complex interaction between the player and the world around him.