Unit 78: Digital Graphics for Games Design

Computer Games Graphics

Concept art- this is when you are basically brainstorming ideas for the development of your game such as the designs for characters, vehicles, weapons etc. Concept art is also used to show a game that may have unfinished graphics or parts of the game that are due to change.

The piece above was concept art for the game "The Last Of Us"

                                           Character concept art for a character in mad max

Texture art- manipulating a sort of background to give you the feeling that one texture is different to another without you actually being able to feel it. for example in this screenshot from gta v you can see that the tree would feel different to the rocks that are next to it.

Background graphics- this is just whatever is in the background of a game such as a wall or the floor or a mountain in the distance. in this farcry 3 screenshot you can see the characters which are apart of the foreground but also the mountains and trees in the background.

In-game interface (the heads up display)- the "HUD" in a game is the display that you see in the screen which gives you information that will help you throughout whatever you have to do, this includes ammo, health, xp, map, compass, etc. this is the hud for call of duty: black ops 2, it shows their ammo count, the mini map and the score for the game mode that they are playing.

Print media art- this is the art work outside of the game that will help to sell it, such as game packaging, the box cover, manual, label and posters that advertise the game. 

Pixel art- the type of artwork for your game and the characters inside it. first there is 2d sprites which are a flat image.

There are also 3d isometric sprites which give more potential with direction in games.

Types of digital game graphics

Raster images (BMP, GIF, TIFF, JPG)- this is a sort of lower quality image that if zoomed into you can see each individual pixel that it is made up of

JPG- this compresses the data to be much smaller in the file 

BMP- bit map pro

GIF- you normally use these for simple logos, icons or symbols, these images are great for creating low resolutions images for websites

Vector images (PSD, WMF, FLA, AI)- these are images that take up little memory but can scale up perfectly no matter how far in you zoom

PSD- the default format that photoshop uses to save data