Movement and Motion

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The Image above is from a part of the video game Kingdom Hearts, where players have to navigate a ship through a 3D environment while dodging obstacles and shooting enemies.  The rout the ship must take from the beginning of the level to the end of the level is a strate line but the 3D obstacles and enemy ships that the player must dodge means that the player needs to be able to move all over the path.  This presented a challenge to the designers of the level because they had to decide how to allow the player to navigate vertically and horizontally through the space as well as forward, without getting disoriented and losing track of where the path is.  In order to solve this problem, the game designers made it so the game camera never moves.  It always stays in the center of the path and everything the ship flies towards simply looks like it is al moving backwards.  while the camera stays in place, the ship is free to move horizontally and vertically on the screen, allowing it to dodge the obstacles that are flying towards the camera and the ship.  The motions of all the obstacles moving toward the camera gives the illusion that the ship and camera are flying forward through space.  

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This is a screen shot of a mini game from Mario Party DS.  In this game, the player's character is on a conveyer belt that is moving towards the camera.  The conveyer belt is covered in food that act as obstacles that players must run around.  If a player does not successfully get around an obstacle, they will fall off the end of the belt and lose the game.  This game is very similar to the game addressed above however simply letting the character move left and right would not work here.  They players would not have enough time to navigate around some of the bigger obstacles if they were confined to a set depth away from the camera like the ship is.  To solve this problem, the game designers allow the player to move there characters forward and backward through space rather than just left and right or up and down.  This allows the players to move father away from the edge of the conveyer belt, which gives them more time to successfully dodge the obstacles and eventually wint the game.

Dimension, Depth, Space, and Scale

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The image above is of a house that was designed using the computer game, The Sims 3.  In this 3D game, players can create avatars and houses for them to live in.  In order to make the design process easier, the game uses a lot of visual cues to communicate depth and dimension within this world.  In this image we see the house in a 2 point perspective.  We also see shading, particularly on the house and plants to help us define where the light is coming from.  We can also see Atmospheric perspective on the hills behind the house, which helps illustrate that they are far away.  It is easy to tell that the white house in the background is pretty far away as well because we can campare its relative size to the familiar size of the green house.  We can also tell what is closer and father away from us by looking at the overlap of some objects, for example, the bush with the orange flowers is the closest object to us because it overlaps the house and other plants, and is not overlapped by anything its self.  

Color and Tone

In the PlayStation 2 vido game, Kingdom Hearts, Color and tone are used throughout the game to create stunning environments that were inspired by a number of Disney movies and cartoons.

Tone

The video above is game footage of the level that took place in the world of Steamboat Willy.  The level was done in all black and white, just as the old Steamboat Willy cartoons were.  In the creation of this game level, tone was much more crucial in visually communicating what was going on because it had to communicate that the characters were in a three dimensional environment, while the animation of the old cartoons only had to display two dimensional environments.  The animation has very high tonal and dynamic ranges which help define the three dimensions more clearly.  The old cartoons actually had lower tonal ranges which made them look much simpler.  

In this three dimensional environment, there are hardly any textures used. Everything from the water to the trees looks as though it has a completely smooth surface.  If the game had higher dynamic range, more texture and detail could have been added to the level, however it would not have fit in as well with the Steamboat Willy theme, since the old cartoons were very lacking in detailed textures.  

Color

Kingdom hearts takes place in one of the most vibrantly colored video game worlds.  This is partially do to the fact that they are trying to create a world in which they can incorporate many styles of disney animation.  If the game colors were really saturated, some colorful worlds like Beauty and the Beast's world would not look right.  

As you move your character around the game world, color helps define objects and lighting within the 3 dimensional world.  Smooth gradients help illustrate the presence of light on rounded shapes like spheres and cylinders, giving the game a very defined 3 dimensional environment.