Signposting tips and tricks

Signposting is a term commonly used in level design to refer to the subconscious tricks designers use to steer players towards game objectives. Despite its name, it is the complete opposite of giving the players a signpost or way-point and instead using colours and shapes to tell the player without telling them. This gives the player a feeling of being in a real living world because it strips away some of those more game-y features. In this post I'm going to go over the basic principle's so you can experiment in your own designs.


Follow the light.

The easiest and the cheapest technique in signposting is playing with light. It's a natural human instinct to avoid dark places for fear of what could be there, and this operates on the smallest change in light. If you brighten one path over the other then players will prefer to take that path. This doesn't have to be scary either. just a little splash of light will do the trick. Beyond using the fear card, light can also serve to clarify certain shapes over others. If there are five doors and only one is lit, a player will on first glance see the door detailing on the lit door first, meaning they see that as a way forward before even realizing the other shapes are doors.

The Stanley Parable is a satirical take on traditional signposting techniques, but this is pretty much what's going on in most levels.

Colour cues

Colours have for a long time been used and reused for alot of things and now serve a functional purpose of conveying information, both in and outside of games. For example, red is a timeless sign of danger, which has been evolutionary ingrained since reptilian times due to blood being red, which caused poisonous animals to evolve to be red to point out their danger, and so on. If you want to forewarn players to stay away, be alert, etc, paint the town red. More specifically to the action genre, red also means explosive so that's another colour cue you can use.

From call of duty 4. as this door opens, red light spills out from underneath to warn the player of an oncoming assault.

Shape

The shape of things is one the most useful tools at your disposal. With it you can offer complete freedom or outright deny access to a part of your level. But lets look at what you can do to coerce people rather than force them down a path.
In multiplayer alot of maps follow a cyclical progression. Where fights will play out from a) to b) to c) and back to a). Now if you want people to move in a circle a great way to drop a hint is to create a big circular structure as a centerpiece for your level. The structure should be designed to produce a crossfire inside it so people are encouraged to skirt the outside, creating a good map flow.
Cones can also be a good steering tool in any kind of shooting game as when charging an enemy a space that opens up is alot more enticing than one that constricts. These are often used in open symmetrical maps to focus firefights to particular interesting play-spaces as opposed to the empty fields that dominate the map.

The Halo 2 map "Shrine" was built around a central cylindrical piece (technically octagonal) that suggested a cyclical motion to the gameplay and had cone-openings dotted throughout the tunnels and doorways.

Those are some basic tricks that can be used in your games to get you thinking. If you want to know more, look into psychology as that's what most of these tricks are operating on. Always explore new ideas and remember to play-test all the time. It's one thing to have a theory that sounds good, it's another for it to work in practice. If you have any levels and you're comfortable sharing, let me know in the comments and I'll be your guinea pig and see how it works.

What new game artist's can learn from old

The visual component of games exists in a very special place compared to other visual mediums. While most art exists with no limitations all of the art in games are limited by the technology of the time. A very interesting dynamic comes into play because of this, because while in normal art mediums perfection is absurd because of the infinite possibilities, the artificial ceiling on game art means that while no game can be visually perfect, it can be the perfect game for the specifications, giving the illusion of perfection.

To achieve this perfection, the artist needs to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the machines they work with, making it a blend of art and science. And only once a generation of hardware has been left behind and all creative avenues exhausted, will the strongest works be clear. An obvious example of this is the style of pixel art; when games were in their infancy and artist could not work in detail, and had to convey the visuals through large blocks of colour. In this article I'm going to focus on a different piece of hardware however: the Dreamcast. And the art: JET SET RADIOOOOOOO!!!

The Game

At Tokyo Game Show 1999, Jet Set Radio was revealed to the world. It was a game about the Japanese punk scene that where players fought for control over Tokyo by spraying graffiti and doing cool tricks with their electric Rollerblades. It was vibrant, lively and made you feel cool. It told the story of a small kid gang expressing themselves in the face of oppression from the literal fun police and presented the protagonists it such a way that you couldn't help but empathize with. And before you knew it you were tagging territory and back-flipping over riot police in the craziest future.

So with this high energy story to tell the question remains, how did they pull it off visually?

The Specs

The Sega was released just after the  dawn of 3D for consoles. There had been alot of stumbling before it in the older consoles, but it was still fairly technically stunted. There was a low amount of polygons in models and this meant smooth surfaces weren't quite there (though developers would definitely try and fail on the xbox and playstation 2). But after years of work in 3 dimensions one thing was clear: you could put alot of bright colours on the screen and big triangles.

The Process

The character concept

So with that knowledge the artist's of Jet Set Radio set about the task of translating their punk style to fit the tools they had to display it. They made very deliberate decisions about each edge and face of the models, and used large blocks of colour to distinguish features, much like the days of pixels. They had the luxury of scale with models though this time thanks to higher resolutions, and so characters didn't undergo spatial deformations. In fact artist liberated by the polygonal style contorted their characters to  possess gangly legs and arms so as to convey the athleticism of the characters.

The character in game. Note the cel-shading rendering technique.

The one liberty they took was in the lighting department. They used some smart rendering techniques to pull off cel-shading, I style of lighting commonly used in animation. This was one of the smartest choices they made in their work, because once people were viewing the art through this lense, they unconsciously disconnected it from reality and stopped making that impossible comparison. Now it was only viewed relative to other animation.

The Results
All these different factors blended to make an art style that stood tallest in its medium and perfectly fitted the music and culture it was trying to portray. If you're into games at all you should check this out; it's cheap its fun and it's visuals are so well tailored to the limits of its time that it still looks great.

If you're interested in picking the game up it can be purchased and downloaded via the Steam game distribution service here. Tell me what you think about it, or any other games that work well within their limits.