While I discussed why low poly is an interesting, legitimate aesthetic choice, I didn't really elaborate on why we chose it for this game. It could have been a simple decision, based solely on the merits of the style itself, but it runs much deeper than that. It connects on a fundamental level to why we are making this game in the first place.
One of the first driving forces behind You and the Garden was the desire to explore the Brutalist aesthetic within a video game. The question began with "How can this style apply to video games, and still remain true to the principles of its origin?" Before we can begin to answer that, let's first discuss what Brutalism itself is.
One of the first driving forces behind You and the Garden was the desire to explore the Brutalist aesthetic within a video game. The question began with "How can this style apply to video games, and still remain true to the principles of its origin?" Before we can begin to answer that, let's first discuss what Brutalism itself is.
Brutalism
Brutalism is an architectural movement that is based around several key concepts that lend it its name and oft-scorned reputation. The first, and most obvious, is the 'brutal' nature of this aesthetic. Buildings constructed in the Brutalist tradition often consist of enormous concrete slabs resembling the brain child of modern science fiction and Mayan architecture. These huge concrete slabs dwarf the human form, rendering them insignificant against the sheer faces of the building. To call these buildings 'brutal', however, is to do them a disservice, and is more reflective of the bitter attitudes of college students or art hipsters sick of their drab, modernist campus than it is of the actual aesthetic. Brutalism, in reality, references Le Corbusier's 'beton brut', or 'raw concrete', which was his material of choice. This leads to the second point concerning the brutalist style. In Le Corbusier's designs it was always important that the means of construction of the building was never obfuscated, but rather, was revealed. To this end, the wood planks used to construct the concrete shapes of a building would leave behind imprints of their surface. Rather than having these smoothed or covered, as other architectural styles would, these bare surfaces are highlighted.
Ok, But What About Games?
Now that we have some basic idea of what brutalism is in terms of architecture, we can ask ourselves: how does it apply to video games?
The main element of brutalism that we have been working to channel in this project has been that of the beton brut. Instead of raw concrete, what about raw polygons? It may sound like a silly semantic difference, but what architects do to raw concrete, game artists do to polygons. Why else would we have textures? To conceal the true form of a model, and to convince the player that there is more detail on a model than there actually is. You could take it further, of course ,and discuss the ways in which we attempt to conceal the artifice of a game. You and the Garden, being a game about exploration and intimacy with an AI, is honest about its fiction. There is no fiction. Well, about as little as possible. You are not encountering a deeply human character, you are encountering an artificial intelligence. You are not in the garden, you are in a game. You can even access the underlying code. From the very beginning, this game is about honesty and artifice, and what lies in between. To this end, there are no textures concealing geometry in You and the Garden. There are lightmaps that are baked on to textures, but these never do more than add lighting to our scene. A cube is always a cube, never a detailed crate with a long history of travel behind it. As mentioned previously, this is where the style becomes an interesting design question: how do I define an object with as few polygons as possible and still have it be recognizable?
The main element of brutalism that we have been working to channel in this project has been that of the beton brut. Instead of raw concrete, what about raw polygons? It may sound like a silly semantic difference, but what architects do to raw concrete, game artists do to polygons. Why else would we have textures? To conceal the true form of a model, and to convince the player that there is more detail on a model than there actually is. You could take it further, of course ,and discuss the ways in which we attempt to conceal the artifice of a game. You and the Garden, being a game about exploration and intimacy with an AI, is honest about its fiction. There is no fiction. Well, about as little as possible. You are not encountering a deeply human character, you are encountering an artificial intelligence. You are not in the garden, you are in a game. You can even access the underlying code. From the very beginning, this game is about honesty and artifice, and what lies in between. To this end, there are no textures concealing geometry in You and the Garden. There are lightmaps that are baked on to textures, but these never do more than add lighting to our scene. A cube is always a cube, never a detailed crate with a long history of travel behind it. As mentioned previously, this is where the style becomes an interesting design question: how do I define an object with as few polygons as possible and still have it be recognizable?
Alternative Aesthetics
What I am getting to here is that we don't need to be continuously chasing the realism dragon, and that there are other ways of going about game development. Often these other ways already exist within other fields, and are simply waiting to be interpreted in relationship to games. Architecture is one of the foremost of these, in my opinion, as you can guess they have much in common in terms of design and aesthetic choices.
Let's look at this historically for a moment. The best thing to happen to painting was the invention of the photographic camera. Initially, it seemed to declare the death of painting. Before the camera, the primary role of painting was to convey history, to realistically capture what had happened previously. Look at painting leading up to the twentieth century. The majority of paintings consisted of either landscapes, portraits, or still-life. If you weren't painting one of those, you weren't engaging in the majority of the artistic landscape of the time (no pun intended). After the invention of the camera, the painting was liberated from this slavish manual labor, and artists began exploring the alternatives that the medium allowed. They explored different ways of playing with the physical nature of paints, brushes, canvases, even cutting materials up and mutilating them to make something new and exciting. Impressionism, pointillism, and fauvism happened. I've previously mentioned fauvism, and this is no accident.
Sound familiar? It should. The same can and should be done with games. Sure, let's try for photorealism, but lets also find what is unique about the medium. Let's find out what games, and only games, can do.