Thread by @delaneykingrox

The art of #gameart asset making is selling an illusion of something to a player using as little resources as possible.

The important part here is selling an illusion. We don't make trees... we arrange some polys and pixels and code into something that conjures a tree mentally

As game artists we aren't making real things, we are just communicating gameplay elements to players.

This is a bush.

This, is also a bush.

The 'bush' from mario takes up a single small grid of index colour references... which means it doubled as the cloud.

One leaf alone of the texture on the other probably takes up 10x the data just for the colour channel- and that doesn't count polys, vertex colors, spec, normal, noise map, shader etc etc

Both tell the player... hey, look... a bush.

So here is a real bush...

Actually, it isn't.

It's a photo of bush compressed down into coloured pixels.

You idiot.

It wasn't a real bush. It was the illusion of a bush made up of data.

But you believed me because a digital photo fools our brains into saying... that's a bush.

You bought the illusion, you received the information I was throwing at you.

Your brain also did a bajillion other things looking at that data. It was looking for boundaries, reflected environment, lighting conditions, assessing weather, time of day, threat level and so on.

This, your brain concludes, is a bush. It looks pretty impassable, it probably doesn't contain food.
There is a wall behind it made from wooden planks that was painted red, but has faded.... yadda yadda...

Your brain is BUSY AF

So we not only have to sell "bush" to the player, we can load more information into that.

This is safe. This is impassable. This is cover. This will not stop bullets. This area is unsafe. This will not hurt me. This place is well tended.

Information. See?

Designing assets isn't about making the most detailed reproduction of a real thing, it's not simulation.... it is STIMULATION and COMMUNICATION.

It is about injecting the ideas we want into some players brain. Past doing that, everything else is wasted.

Time, data, disc size, processing power.

Here, gameplay is communicated at a glance. It is all plants. Foreground, distant, background, safe, dangerous.

Nup. It's just a bunch of pixels.

This bunch of pixels says "teeth, thorns, saws, jaws, fly traps, barbed wire, that time you nicked yourself on a saw blade."

A few pixels and polys is doing that to your brain.

It is pixel sorcery.

These are not vines. There is no distance. It is just pixels of colour.

But we see vines, we see distance, we see foreground, background, we feel light passing through the material.

Imagine biting into one. Go on. What sound and taste does your mind throw at you?

What does this taste like?

Pixels. It tastes of pixels.

Which, as we know, taste of computer monitor screen laminate.

This is what game artists actually do.

And we do it with these tools.

Boop

This is not a pipe

This is not Senua.

This is data skillfully being used to make links in your brain.

Your art is selling that illusion, tricking players into seeing things that aren't real.

What is the MINIMUM of this...

To do this...

The point is, learn to use your resources to get to that illusion sale as efficiently as possible.

This is not an elf.

This is actually just some triangles, a shader and some grids of data.

This isn't casting a shadow.

This invisible low poly head is casting the shadow.

A shadow which isn't actually a shadow but a rendered texture with a depth value drawn from a lights point of view.

Cheap illusions to make cheap illusions.

I am not Delaney King. I am pixels.

Thanks for listening.

These free lectures are free.

But you can always stimulate a computer to transfer data from one account to another that represents value to me in the form of a tip here.

Everything is fake until it's money.

ko-fi.com/dellak

Images referenced from

ORI and the Blind Forest
SENUA'S SAGA
Super mario bros.
Turbosquid (bush)

My own elf demo from #NZGDC

Be gay pixels. Do pixel crimes.