esselfortium
Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
Posts: 5152
Registered: 01-02 |
I might as well crosspost this little impromptu guide that I posted in a Skulltag thread a few minutes ago, since it'll be of far more lasting use here.
Tip 6: On "Detailing," or General Visual Design and Arrangement
esselfortium posted somewhere on Skulltag.net:
Visual beauty in a game level doesn't mean much if it's no fun to play, so of course gameplay takes precedence: without it, there's no reason for anyone to play your beautiful map.
With that said, though, "lol just add more detail" and "this has too much detail" (yes, both of them) are and have always been totally bullshit advice. Increasing the geometric complexity of a level could actually make it look worse if you're Doing It Wrong. On the other side of the same coin, an exceptionally well-designed low-detail map can look sleek and clean, rather than like an unfinished mess.
Some things I'd recommend instead of "add more detail" for improving the looks of a map, regardless of whether it's 80 sectors or 8000:
- Clean texturing, both in terms of choices and careful attention paid to realistic-looking alignment and texture usage.
Espi's vanilla mapset Suspended in Dusk is one of the great examples of this, and was a major catalyst in the development of my mapping style and technique.
- A good arrangement of light and dark colors that balances nicely across the player's view (not just contrast in lighting, but texture choices).
- A consistent, balanced, and intertwined color scheme.
The same color scheme doesn't even necessarily need to be carried throughout your entire map for it to be effective; I think a screenshot might be the clearest way to get across what I'm trying to say here. This picture is slightly outdated now (the gold lamps and pipes have since been turned red), but notice how the orange (or tan, or whatever you want to call it) and gray colors are intertwined. The orange floor on the lower portion of the screen is balanced by the matching orange upper-mid walls and the highlights of the small orange trim. Similarly, the sloped gray walls near the ceiling are balanced by the smaller gray strip across the walls matching them, with the orange strip stuck in between them.
- Interesting shapes and angles in the map, even if they're just architecture.
- Organized arrangement and spacing of visual structures.
Think of imaginary lines being drawn across your map connecting different structures: do the lines form a neat, cleanly arrangement, or do they highlight a mishmash of randomly placed map geometry
Most of this isn't really an exact science, and honestly I sort of just mess with it until it looks good to me while vaguely keeping some of these concepts in mind. Some of these are stuff I didn't even think of at all until pretty recently!
Anyway, uh...this has been a somewhat off-topic tangent mainly resultant from my seeing people in here talking about "going overboard" or "just add random detail later", but hopefully someone will read it and get some use out of it.
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Last edited by esselfortium on 12-30-11 at 06:55
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01-18-09 19:47 
