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#Post#: 30--------------------------------------------------
Using Lighting to Convey Mood
DIR By: Pam
Date: May 21, 2021, 7:27 am
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Hello! My name is Ben Chandler and I've been interested in the
creation of art for adventure games for a number of years now. I
started tinkering with designing my own games when I was 18
years old, making various small things for years until
eventually being hired by Wadjet Eye Games as an artist. I've
been fortunate enough to work on a number of their titles, and
have been working full time with them for several years now.
The art of adventure games is a fascinating subject to me, and
one I study regularly. I'm trying to decipher the visual
language of the genre, so to speak, and figure out what makes
them look great, and what influences both the conscious and
subconscious decisions artists make when they work. It's an
endlessly deep subject, and one I love investigating. Once we
understand some of the things that make an image work, we'll
never look at a scene the same way again.
When creating scenery briefs, writers often use words that can
be a little odd to translate to a visual concept. “Moody”,
“Atmospheric” and “Inviting” come to mind, and adjectives like
“Oppressive” and “Cold” litter the many descriptions of
backdrops that make an adventure game. These words do evoke
images, but it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that
allows us to capture the feel these writers are asking us to
convey in a scene. One excellent place to start, for me, is with
lighting.
Light and darkness had their place in our virtual adventures
long before graphics were a feature. Consider the importance of
lamps in Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork – pioneers of the genre
that understood the thrill of exploring a dark environment with
a limited resource to light the way. Darkness feels mysterious
and dangerous to us, just as ample light feels welcoming and
safe. These inherent implications tied to light and darkness are
an artist's friend, and go a long way toward helping us achieve
a desired atmosphere in a scene.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=01.png
I've found lighting incredibly useful in my time as a background
artist. In The Blackwell Epiphany, Dave Gilbert's script called
for an eerie, oppressive feel, and I shunned the usual blue
shades that night scenes have for a more unconventional green
ambient glow that, to me, captured the gloomy and mysterious
feel of the game's environments. A big inspiration for this was
the green hue a lot of the 'found footage' representations of
paranormal stories feature as a result of shots captured in
night mode, a visual archetype that I was willing to capitalise
on. To contrast this, I used warm, welcoming yellowish lights in
certain spots, which I felt would act as pockets of familiarity
among the enigmatic green glow.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=02.png
When working with James Dearden on Technobabylon, we wanted to
capture a city whose every aspect is reliant on high-tech
living. For this I switched to using very cool, stark lighting –
the unnatural glow of blue displays and holograms, and the harsh
white light that can only come from man-made lighting. By
avoiding warmth in all but the smallest of lights, I tried to
make many of the scenes look sterile and free of natural
influence; a cold, unwelcoming city. Much of my influence for
this came from the cold lighting in other cyberpunk and science
fiction titles like Deus Ex: Invisible War, Ghost in the Shell
and Tron.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=03.png
When working with Francisco Gonzalez on Shardlight, the world in
question was a much more sickly, devastated affair. Here we had
a destroyed, post-war world with an environment that was
desolate and an atmosphere ruined. The sun was intended to feel
harsh and unforgiving, the warm yellows and browns of the
glowing sky representing a hot, dry atmosphere filled with dust.
In addition to the yellows of the sun, I used green highlights
in the form of shards of glowing glass to give a poisoned
feeling. I still used blue lights in a few places, saving them
specifically for electrical devices, such as the light that can
be seen in the tunnel here. So strong are the connotations of
radioactivity from the bright green glow that many people
assumed the glowing shards of glass were the source of the
game's plague – a testament to how powerful the connotations of
a particular hue can be.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=04.png
Unavowed, my current project with Dave Gilbert, represents a
different atmosphere entirely. The intent is to represent a
contemporary New York City, much like Blackwell Epiphany, but
rather than the ghostly greens of that title, here we were
looking at a more infernal story, and studying comics such as
Hellblazer showed me just how effective red and pink skies can
be for this sort of atmosphere. You can see here how the sun
sets the sky ablaze with a hot, oppressive red that catches the
buildings and clouds. It's not dark and gloomy like I was going
for in Epiphany, but it's ominous nevertheless. You can also see
how I tried using blue and yellow light in the doors and windows
of buildings to humanise them as compared to the red glare of
the sun.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=05.png
As a player, lighting in games has impressed me in titles as
early as Loom in its EGA splendour. I love the way Bishop
Mandible's cathedral creates a very dark, recognisable
silhouette against the evening sky, and the way the sinister
green light bathes the tombstones of the graveyard in an
ethereal glow, adding to the foreboding presence of the already
menacing structure. Compare how foreboding the dark palette with
its sinister green glow feels to the much brighter, friendlier
castle scene from King's Quest II. Even the presence of an eerie
dead tree in the distance and haunting ghosts guarding the door
can't compete with the evocative lighting of Loom.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=06.png
The VGA era brought more potential to play around with lighting,
and games like King's Quest VI took excellent advantage of this.
From the sunny and pleasant Isle of the Crown to the gloomy
lands of the dead, the artists used different lighting
conditions to convey specific atmospheres. The sunny beach scene
here feels calm and friendly, even with the presence of the
wrecked ship – the weather looks clear and fine, and the path is
well lit. By contrast, the lands of the dead present us with
shadows and an otherworldly glow that emphasises the already
grotesque landscape.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=07.jpg
The colour of light plays a massive role in how it makes us
feel. Notice how compared to the sunny, yellow KQ6 shot above,
the white light of Syberia 2's daylight feels cold and wintery.
This scene from Syberia 2 is particularly interesting because it
uses pure white “God rays” to give an air of reverence to the
stony monastery, a visual icon we're familiar with and
understand immediately. Compare that to the sinister red
lighting of the shot from The Journey Down: Chapter 3, which
seems mysterious and dangerous. It's not just the vivid red
light that feels threatening, either – the angle of light coming
up from below lights things in an eerie, unnatural way that
lends great visual language to the scene. I like to think of
this as the “flashlight under the face” angle – the
unfamiliarity of it makes us uneasy.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=08.jpg
Direction plays a big part in lighting's power – the screenshot
from Runaway here shows what photographers refer to as “The
Golden Hour,” where the late afternoon sun is warm and lazy, and
shadows are long and soft compared to the harsh shadows cast by
the glare of the midday sun. The light is really allowed to flow
through the scene, giving it a very pleasant glow. The image
from Kentucky Route Zero shows a much more directed light; here
the headlights act as a spotlight, directing our attention
immediately to a very specific location, and the beams of light
cut through the darkness with a hard edge. This feels more like
a single, particular feature in an environment than a full
landscape, and the way it emphasises the forms of the trees and
power lines is immediately eye-catching.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=twp.png
One of my favourite examples of the true power of lighting to
convey a mood is the upcoming Thimbleweed Park. Compare the two
versions of this location – from the simple, basic original to
the reworked version with its sickly fluorescent lights that
capture the feeling of a late night convenience store perfectly.
While objectively being the same location, the reworked version
tells a much more convincing story, and really increases the
immersion of the environment.
HTML https://adventuregamers.com/?ACT=49&d=32329&fid=43&f=09.png
One last important thing to note: as evocative as light (and the
lack thereof) can be, it's essential that playability remains
the chief concern. As interesting as the dark, gloomy scene from
Alien Incident is here, the odd lighting makes it quite hard to
see where we can go, what we can use and even what some of the
things are. Discworld Noir's warehouse, pictured to the right of
it, takes things to an even further extreme. While flashes of
lighting periodically help, the fact remains that the warehouse
is incredibly hard to search because of the extreme levels of
darkness, further hindered by the fact that the designers wanted
us to find a very small item.
Lighting, then, is a powerful force in adventure game art, and
presents us with a very diverse range of tools to help set the
scene. It's impossible to overstate how much tone can be
conveyed with a very carefully chosen lighting set-up, and I
hope this very brief introduction demonstrates some of the
decisions artists consciously make with their lights in order to
tell a story. I'm always on the lookout for interesting uses of
light when I play adventure games, and background artists never
cease to impress me with how they use it to tell their stories.
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