The art of mass-market social games
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Ben Lee
Art Director
"Bringing social games to life is just as challenging as devising a deathmatch arena"
21 September 2009
Gamers, the specialist press and even game developers have long measured progress in graphics by escalating pixels and polygon counts. Oh, and bullets and explosions. With few exceptions (Gran Turismo comes to mind) accolades for graphics invariably go to first-person shooters striving for photo-realism. Yet from Sam and Max to Myst to Viva Piñata, game artists have pushed the medium’s visual limits in entirely different directions. More recently, Nintendo isn’t now resurgent despite Wii and DS’s simple graphics but because of them. At the other end of the spectrum is Buzz!, a benchmark mass-market game with cutting-edge graphics. Check out Buzz! on the PlayStation 3 and you’ll see characters, materials and lighting as good as anything else out there, though admittedly with less grunts-and-ammo. As our art director Ben Lee tells interviewees, “Working at Relentless as a 3D modeller, you’ll be building space hoppers, not guns.”
Seeing is believing
Ben explains the challenge of creating art for a social game is just as steep as with other genres, but how we measure success is very different. "For us it’s not about explosions or physics effects or trying to show off your engine,” he says. “It’s about trying to reassure the user – who is often a different type of gamer – that they’re playing a game they understand.
Buzz! is a TV quiz show, so it should look and feel like a TV show. Blue Toad Murder Files carefully recreates a Sunday night whodunit drama. Our big unannounced title also plays to people’s comfort of familiarity”. That’s a very different approach to conventional game graphics, where the focus is usually on wowing hardcore gamers with visual complexity. As social game developers, we make a gamer feel at home, rather than out of place. We’re still after an emotional response, but rather than fear or tension we want to create fun and humour.
Ben draws a comparison with the iPod. Apple’s music player wasn’t the biggest or the most technically advanced player on the market, but it was the easiest to understand, and it looked great, too. That’s where Apple had focussed its efforts, it was what the public wanted, and consumers lapped it up. So what do we aim for when creating graphics for social games?
Familiarity
It’s no accident Buzz! is a TV quiz show – if we’ve done our job properly, we don’t need a backstory or a manual, because you immediately know what’s going on as soon as you load it. “As the Buzz! games have progressed, the environments look much more real,” says Ben, explaining how the art supports this illusion. “On PlayStation 3, Buzz! doesn’t look like an approximation of TV any more – it looks like a real studio set.”
Physicality
Both Buzz! and Blue Toad play host to cartoon-styled contestants, but they have fabric and skin from the top-drawer of game graphics. “We’re using every next gen trick we can, but we do so to take the edges off the unreality of the characters, to make them feel more familiar,” says Ben, citing by way of illustration Pixar’s characters, which look completely unrealistic and yet seem composed from real materials. “That’s increasingly what we’ll do with our PlayStation 3 games,” he says. “We’ll happily create a crazy cartoon character, but when it’s finally rendered it will look like a physical object, as opposed to a 2D trick, because it has surface and weight, volume and dimension. We might have a funny-looking hippopotamus man in suit, but the suit will look like you could touch it.”
Fun
Social gaming is about entertainment, off-screen as well as on. While the characters have plenty of love lavished on them, they’re ultimately an aid to the gameplay rather than the main focus, which means we have lots of latitude to play things for laughs. “The characters are also important in terms of marketing, but it’s the people on the sofa matter most,” says Ben. “In focus tests, people who would normally play Metal Gear Solid or Street Fighter will quite happily play Buzz! because they’re not bothered by the host – they’re interested in challenging their friends with the buzzers.”
Bring all three criteria together and we get visually compelling game, where advances in graphics help players enjoy themselves more, rather than alienating them. An example: in Buzz! on PlayStation 3 there are far fewer icons. Our old ‘Pass the Bomb’ round used a bomb icon that hopped over the players’ score bars, but on PS3 the characters juggle a real bomb. They look frightened when they catch it and when it explodes they’re covered with persistent soot. It’s familiar, it looks physically real, and it’s much more fun than an icon. Artists at Relentless use 3ds Max, Mudbox and our own material shaders, and we can deform meshes with the best of them. We use industry-leading tools, and our artists want to squeeze every bit from the hardware. But social gamers? They just want to have fun. “A lot of the time the technology in a hardcore game is attractive to someone whose hobby it is, but it’s off-putting to someone who doesn’t understand it,” Ben concludes. “As artists, we try to remove those barriers.”