I wrote a post about stylization in games:

http://lucas.hardi.org/?p=15

and I thought it would be worthwhile to post it here and see what people though about the topic. I expect some of you have some opinions about what's a good style and what's a bad one. WELL, DO YOU?

I'm always up for stylization in games.

I'm sick sick sick of realism.

good start, but it feels short. Can't see anything that should be changed, but plenty that could be elaborated upon.

For example, how would one go about setting a style for a game? What's the best way to explore styles, test them, choose one, and then apply it consistently to a project?

Could you provide illustrated examples of a stylistic exploration, show the process as the styles were refined and the final one chosen, and why it was chosen?

I wish I had enough experience to write up something on this... I've got me some opinions but not nearly enough artistic mileage to really back them up. It would be great to see this article grow from just a short article on why stylization is good to a useful pseudo-tutorial for people trying to come up with a unique style but struggling with the process.

Heyyy.. Lucas, nice. You make me cry to work on a stylized game, and after playing TF2 some, I'm incredibly ready to work on such art.

interesting article. I think good and bad stylisation can be defined by the reasons the creators chose it (and the consequent results)

Sometimes the temptation is there to use the idea of stylisation for the express reason of cutting corners, but then no further thought goes into it and someone pipes up 'cell shaded! we don't have to texture anything!'. So if its used just as a shortcut and not as an artists tool then it's destined to fall flat. The style has to be something the creator *and the audience 'gets' (it clicks, like tf2, exit, paper mario- 'oooh shit yeah' type of thing)

I think that realism should only be used in situations where it'd make sense, and even then not always.
I mean come on who the fuck tries to make a game about bomber man realistic
wtf

Pretty decent write up there doc. I'm a realist at heart when it comes to creating art. I guess being able to recreate reality in image always seemed to be the holy grail of art to me. But, honestly, I love style a ton! Just like skankerzero I'm very tired of realism in games. For me, anymore, I like to blend stylistic design with more realistic texturing and rendering.

As far as good style vs. bad style...

Good: WoW, TF2, Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, Fable and Wind Waker just to name a few.

Bad: I'm having a tough time trying to think of some games that I consider to be bad in their stylization. While I liked some of the zany characters in Timesplitters, I can't say I particularly liked their style. Also, I can't say I was a big fan of the semi realistic/ semi gum drop comic look that was the redesign of Joanna Dark from Perfect Dark Zero. Also, virtual fighter, if you can say it has it's own style, I have never been a fan of. I really dislike all of the characters and well I personally hate the gameplay. I don't understand why a lot of people hail it as such a great fighter.

Good read indeed.

I think one of the terrible ironies is that what you have stated is the obvious truth. Seeing how games are meant to be a creative medium, one would think that ALL processes in its development would be creative as well, and by that i mean creative problem solving and the ability to assess and realize the situation the group will be in for the duration of the project.

That truth can hit us in the face over and over and over again, but the second we see that latest hi-res 'in game' screenshot our brains fall out our ears and we have to surpass that art some way or somehow. It's never the process most artists look at, it's the end result, and that's fine for a person or group funding the project or a consumer buying the game, but for a developer, trying to achieve that end result can spell months of heartache and doom for the project's over all level of quality.

It's just a bummer that we are so set in our ways, yet we still show awe for those few devs that can make something stylized totally awesome.

It would help your argument be more believable if you had data to draw from.

In philosophy there is a difference between "Believing" and "Knowing". You have to convince the audience that you "Know" what you are saying is true by providing data. Use examples of games with stylized graphics, and how they came to critical acclaim status, games that come to mind are Pshychonauts, Okami, Sam and Max, Team Fortress 2 coma to mind immediately, but the rub here is that 2 of those games were critically acclaimed, but absolutely horror on the shelf, they sold like shit, and the studios producing them have since shuttered their doors. You are going to come across people who disprove your theories, because you haven't backed anything up with data. Do that and your article will be water tight.

I for one value style over realism, but I am a realist, and I understand that the average joe wants WOW graphics, and that usually means realistic.

Wait, which two studios shuttered their doors? Clover's the only one of those four. And, didn't okami actually sell fairly decently?

I dont think its all about dollars and cents here. You could work at EA making madden 20XX for the next hundred years and youll still have enough fratboy xbox dewds throwing money at the franchise to make a killing. That game will also never be about creative freedom, its a forumula and if EA could figure out a way to do the whole thing by scanning (as i hear they are doing on characters already) im sure that they would.
The fact is that we are lucky enough to have a medium that is practically free from most design constraints as far as style goes. The game environment is the perfect playground of doing abstract work that involve both motion and interaction, all you need is to apply the creativity.
Yet i think we are still stuck in the tail end of the movie era, movies being infinitely more constrained in what they can do creatively (although less so since 3d graphics) and most games are stuck trying to copy the medium that is most familiar, and because of this inheriting all the constraints to the design that the film has to deal with.
It's going to take some time and a serious push to pull away from that and start seeing what the essence of games are really capable of as an art medium, because i think it's only now that we are being acknowledged as a real medium. I also doubt that any of the real masterpieces of the game medium have been made yet, but i believe we're coming to a turning point now, where we ARE capable of near photorealism and now people are saying...ok, we proved that, now we can do anything, so whats next?

Did Sam and Max sell well?

Are cartoony games automatically stylized? Is everything other than strict realism stylized? Seems to me the vast majority of games are stylized to some degree. I guess all the military themed games usually try and adhere to the real world, but all the rts, rpg, action/adventure games, platformers, fighters, puzzle games, a lot of fps - they're all stylized. Oh - i guess sports titles are usually realistic, aren't they?

I guess my point is that stylization seems to only count if it is past a certain threshold that I'm not aware of. Would you consider MGS4 realistic or stylized?

/ramble

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I for one value style over realism, but I am a realist, and I understand that the average joe wants WOW graphics, and that usually means realistic.

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WOW is super stylized and is used as one of his examples.

I think he means wow as in "wow! that looks so realistic" as opposed to World Of Warcraft. Might be wrong though... if he is talking about World of Warcraft then he's dead wrong [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Some good comments in here that I want to respond to later.

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating extreme stylization, like, say, Viewtiful Joe or Okami.

Consider something like Assassin's Creed that stylizes it's color palette, but tries to be very realistic with basically everything else.

Even something like Kane & Lynch is stylizing trying to reference a certain kind of film and use it to establish a tone for the game.

There's infinite ways to approach it. Every game has it's style, what I'm advocating is to make carefully considered choices about what that style should be. Don't just "let it happen" and leave it up to the collective intelligence of your programmers and artists. Consistency is key, and you can't get consistency with a big team of people, each with their own creative spirits. You can get a lot of cool individual components, but not a cohesive style.

I feel most games are stylized to an extent as well. To answer Sectaurs, I definitely think MGS4 is stylized as well as titles like Gears of War. Most of the examples of good style that I cited are just more noticeable to me. I don't feel like Shadow of the Colossus is a particularly cartoony title, but I think it's overall feel and atmosphere are dripping with style.

One title that, to me, feels pretty devoid of style is Oblivion. But I guess even it's over all aesthetic could be deemed "it's style." /shrug

Here is what Merriam-Webster Dictionary had to say:

stylize : to conform to a conventional style; specifically : to represent or design according to a style or stylistic pattern rather than according to nature or tradition

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Consistent stylization is going make your game more immersive than trying to be the extraordinarily rare game that achieves that next leap in virtual realism.

The goal has always been believability; The Illusion of Life. It just gets confused with realism sometimes.

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Thank you. Every so often a game is released claiming to be the next step in realistic gaming, and I cringe. Larger textures, and new shaders have not provided an immersive experience for me. When everything in the world works together nicely, I'm pulled in. Interaction with environment, and characters. Using objects to interact with characters. Having characters express emotion and reaction and interaction and tactics with the environment. Giving characters different tasks, while maintaining balance. Introducing new methods of gameplay and scenarios while remaining simplistic in design. Light that produces a more realistic view of the environment with proper use of colors to focus attention, instead of intense light, dark shadow, blurry after-effect. Showing any attempt at diversity. This all contributes to believablilty, moreso than any normal map or shader. To me, an artistic direction focused on style simply lends an attractive aesthetic to a fun believable gameplay experience. It's enjoyable to watch, even when you revisit it months later. It always reached its goal, instead of falling short with every attempt. I would love to only work on fun stylized low res games that require artistic creativity, instead of the next content packed WWII title, or Scifi plastic and clay bloomfest.

I think the biggest reason to make a stylized game is that everything else ages way too quickly. TF2 will still look pretty good 2-3 years down the road... but no game that was made to look realistic 2-3 years ago looks any good by now.
Sure that doesn't really matter as much with SP games, but MP games with a long shelf-life definitly benefit.

style without substance is like crackers without christmas

doc rob, my man. I tend to use the example of Super Mario Bros having more convincing graphics than, say, Max Payne. The former is completely congruent, and as you learn the rules of that universe, they become predictable and convincing. In the more "photo real" games however, you let loose a rocket and it doesn't knock over a mailbox, or there are cars you can't drive and phones you can't use and invisible walls and so on..

You know what happened.. there used to be a clear distinction between games and simulators.. nowadays most games ARE simulators.. And they forget what GAMES are.

I'm not impressed with cel shaded games and that any more though, cmon.. every time one of those titles are released they're hailed as revitalizing game graphics or whatever which is a load of bollocks. NPR ought to be more than just black outlines. I digress, though. Nice writeup

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You know what happened.. there used to be a clear distinction between games and simulators. nowadays most games ARE simulators.. And they forget what GAMES are.

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Crysis is probably the best example of an realtime outdoor environment simulator. They put a game in it somewhere. I read an article once that stated "virtual reality died when john carmack invented a 3d game that moved faster than 5 FPS". Then we realized that the idea of virtual reality wasn't that fun, games were. Now it seems the big marketing minds in charge are trying to push the virtual reality dream again using clever cg movies to convince the consumer to by less refined games, only to have Nintendo come out with a device that makes interaction in games more believable, on top of an already loved Nintendo style.

I really can't wait for a new pikmin game be it Wii or DS!

A thought provoking read thanks Lucas. You make some great points, brief though it is.
I do think we need to be careful with potentially making some sweeping generalizations here though. Some comments in this thread suggest that anything that isn't as extremely stylized as TF2 is without artist merit, and who are we to make that judgement? I mean, what is style really? Perhaps its as simple as a rule set and consistency?
Style is subjective. To me at least, Oblivion appears to have absolutely no visual style because it's chock full of poor quality, messy, inconsistent and photosourced Art. I actually feel the same way about HL2. But its world is so unique that most people perceive it to have style. Fuck, who am I to suggest that poorly UV'd photosourced Art isn't style? It's consistent in its inconsistency, or something. So perhaps there's a distinction to be made here between Art asset style and style that comes from the game world lore? Here's what I'm driving at: As artists we mostly all raved about the awesome Art deco feel to Bioshock, but it's render style was actually aspiring to be pretty damn realistic. Assets were lit realistically, they had normal and specular maps. An artist working on a prop for Bioshock, clearly once he knew the subject matter, was simply trying to make it look as realistic as possible within the constraints. So we think Bioshocks visuals sucks now that TF2 is out do we? Because Bioshock looked more 'realz'? I would hope not. If everything looked like TF2 then photosourced would become a style. But what gives Bioshock *style* is the subject matter depicted in its world, not its render style. It starts to get very confusing when you have to differentiate between *render* style and the style of subject matter. Well shit, it does when you're talking to my boss at least. I've had a real hard time making those distinctions that you'd think would be fairly simple concepts to grasp.
To me MGS has a distinct style, due to a particular color palette and hand painted textures. edit: sorry, just read your last post [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] That clarifies things a bit yeah, so i think that's worth fleshing out.

'Style' is very hard to quantify. In the context of a videogame, consistency is key imo. If WoW didn't come with a texture set looking like it was painted by one person, it wouldn't have been perceived as half as stylized as it is Im certain. How far things are actually 'stylized' really has to accommodate so many many factors on a project though. Something I've been acutely aware of for the last 6 months now trying to nail a look for our game. There are an awful lot of stakeholders.
An interesting thing that just occurred to me, is that looking back upon my 6 years at EA HQ, I never *ever* had an Art director do anything other than wander around saying yes or no to an asset. i.e a reactive versus a proactive approach to Art direction. In that situation things will generally default to 'lets make it as realistic as possible'. I'm currently in the middle of writing a highly detailed style guide for our game, in the hope to avoid that situation, but even then it's just not that simple. It's really hard to get an Art team on the same page, and kick 'em out of old habits into doing something a new way. Your style is likely not going to just 'be' at the outset, but more likely it's an evolving, organic thing that is influenced by many many factors. The different perspectives from the artists on your team, designers, project leaders, marketing people, competing products, target audience, focus testing, time constraints, gameplay, subject matter, camera distance to player, many, many things. It's just never ever as simple or easy as saying 'let's pick a style'.

Great post, Daz [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Nice post Daz.
I said that so I could say this:
Quantify of the county!