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#Post#: 21--------------------------------------------------
In Defense of Inconsistency
DIR By: Pam
Date: May 20, 2021, 2:49 pm
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“The most important thing to remember when doing graphics for a
game, regardless of art style, is that the elements remain
consistent.”
This is a great piece of advice I've given to beginners, and
most likely given it myself. Keeping a game's art style
consistent will help a project feel cohesive to players, allow
the atmosphere of any scene to remain uniform, and make for a
more polished, professional feeling project.
Rules like this in art are especially interesting, because they
both provide excellent guidance and also give cause to
investigate why this rule exists, and why it might be wrong in
certain scenarios. I want to suggest that breaking this (and
other) rules of art is a wonderful thing to try – partially
because it's fun to be contrary and annoy the people that like
making up rules, but mostly because the subversion of particular
expectations or standards can have memorable, practical or just
funny results. Creating moments like these is a primary goal of
an artist, and therefore being inconsistent can be a very
powerful tool.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com//?ACT=49&d=34646&fid=43&f=1.png
There's definitely a very strong case to be made for
consistency, though. My first experience working with Wadjet Eye
Games was doing art for the last couple of games in the
Blackwell series. Notable in that each of the five titles had a
different art team working on them, my efforts to 'fit in' with
the style established in earlier titles initially resulted in
Rosa looking like a denim-clad bean with spectacles (a character
sprite that is, thankfully, lost to time). Numerous edits later,
and we settled on the slightly awkward bobbleheaded version that
Deception (fourth image above) sported – a strange hybrid
between what had been my own style previously and what I thought
was a decent approximation of the earlier styles in the series.
Epiphany (far right) was notably easier for me, as no longer was
I trying to remain consistent with someone else's style. Here I
was trying to make a better version of a style I'd already
worked in, and the process was much less painful. The fact that
I'd taken over the background art role helped, too, with my
characters and backgrounds meshing more naturally simply because
of a consistency in approach with regards to details and
colours. The result still looks slightly varied, and overall the
series has the odd feature of each game looking quite noticeably
different from the others. I think this is eased, somewhat, by
the extremely low resolution of these titles, which allows most
people to regard them as 'pixel art games' and ignore the
inconsistencies both in style and skill.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com//?ACT=49&d=34646&fid=43&f=2.jpg
So as a general rule consistency makes sense, but as I said,
inconsistency can be an interesting thing. We've already covered
the topic of creating other dimensions with art in this series,
and being inconsistent can really bring about a mood change. I
praised the wonderful dimension shift in Grim Fandango at the
time, and the inconsistency of that scene with the rest of the
game is one of the loveliest approaches to such a thing. By
embracing it as a feature, the game owns this as a style, and
breaking rules willingly brings about the memorable and funny
results I promised earlier.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com//?ACT=49&d=34646&fid=43&f=3.png
Another example of artists changing style on purpose can be seen
in Leisure Suit Larry 6. Most of the game features a grotesquely
drawn Larry wandering around garish scenes with a tacky
brutality of colours and angles to explore, which captures mid
‘90s advertising campaign design unfortunately well. The ladies
whose affections Larry seeks to win, however, are drawn in a
much more pleasant style. It seems that the artists were keeping
Larry's goal in mind, and that in order for someone with Larry's
character depth to find someone appealing, they should conform
to fairly traditional beauty standards. It's an interesting
juxtaposition of styles that constructs a set of goals designed
to be easy to sympathise with and understand from Larry’s point
of view, and also develops a clear contrast between the
character of Larry and the people he meets.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com//?ACT=49&d=34646&fid=43&f=4.png
One really fun example of a marked difference in style is in
Alone in the Dark. Why, for example, does a startled frog's face
receive more detail than the main characters? Ostensibly one can
easily dismiss this as a by-product of technology, with which
static elements were easy to render in great complexity and
dynamic ones were not, but the game already featured a similarly
low detail model for the frog. Clearly the developers felt that
doing a more explicit close-up of the frog was warranted, adding
something more to the game's introduction than the animation of
it leaping could provide. Conveying extra emotion through the
characters, meanwhile, is done mostly via the gameplay and the
range of camera angles, meaning that the low detail model works
perfectly well – handsome and detailed close-ups aren't
necessary if you have players directly trying to avoid the
attentions of foul creatures themselves.
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Aside from aesthetic reasons, there are practical reasons for
having inconsistencies in a style. Proponents of 'pixel art'
speak at great length about the importance of having consistent
pixel sizes within a piece, and usually I'd agree that this is
very helpful. In a dialogue-heavy game such as The Darkside
Detective, however, the pixels are so large that rendering text
in a font that matched the rest of the game would be entirely
impractical and illegible. Keeping the character and environment
pixel sizes consistent while using a font with much smaller
pixels means that the many fine jokes can be more easily read.
As always in games, the practicality of being able to play the
game should take precedence over any aesthetic principle such as
this.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com//?ACT=49&d=34646&fid=43&f=6.png
Of course, it's pointless defending inconsistency in art without
admitting the places in which it actively hurts a title. The
SVGA version of Gabriel Knight is a great example of where a
nitpicky artist who has spent too many hours staring at massive
pixels will be put off immediately. Notice how certain items in
the image – the newspaper, coffee pot, and magnifying glass, for
example – are drawn in much finer detail than the rest of the
scene. In theory, having higher resolution graphics is a great
thing, but having one quite finely detailed newspaper next to a
pile of much blockier, blurrier books just looks like a mistake,
and ruins the immersion for me. For the average player this
might not be an issue, but to me as an artist looking for
inspiration within the works of others, this is hard to deal
with.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com//?ACT=49&d=34646&fid=43&f=7.png
Inconsistencies within a series can hurt, too. The middle King's
Quest games managed to maintain the colourful, whimsical feel of
the original titles while still managing to add in more detail,
realism and atmosphere. Even the considerably divisive seventh
game stays true to the appearance of a fairytale brought to
virtual life, despite the clear aspirations towards a more
childlike cartoon approach. Mask of Eternity, however, loses
this charm and is instead rendered in a bleak, drab world of
blocky 3D. Compare the blue skies and warm, sunlit grass of the
first shot here to the oppressive colours of its neighbour. It's
hard to imagine these games being connected in any way.
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It's not just colours, either. The palette choices in Simon the
Sorcerer 3D aren't too dissimilar to those of its predecessors,
but the weird, blocky aesthetic it sports simply doesn't feel
right next to the carefully detailed scenery and animations that
came before. Perhaps this can simply be put this down to the
perils of moving from 2D to 3D before the technology could
properly support it, as Telltale's take on Sam & Max five years
later is a good example of a series featuring low resolution 2D
being followed by a higher resolution 3D game that still manages
to capture its original aesthetic well. Still, it was a
deliberate design decision to go this route, and the series
suffered greatly for its radical, ill-advised change.
Every element in visual arts is a tool, and a tool can both
improve and ruin the piece you are working on. Just as a hammer
wielded incorrectly can yield disastrous results,
inconsistencies in visual style can be extremely damaging.
There's a reason people preach against it, and it's definitely a
good policy to strive for consistency overall. As always,
though, the exception to a rule exists for a reason. As with any
creative discipline, a rule broken with a sensitivity towards
the effect that breaking said rule will create empowers the
artist to steer a game's style in particular ways. Consistency,
or the absence thereof, isn't a right or wrong way to approach
visual art. Instead, it's a discipline to be studied, examined
and experimented with, and a very effective tool to have in
one's collection.
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