What are computer game graphics?
Computer game graphics are the way a game is displayed. A game could be presented in various ways. For example, a game could be made in a first/third-person, top-down, side-scrolling or simply 2D or 3D. There are also techniques that can be used such as: the lighting and shadows of objects, the animations of objects and maybe a heads up display.
What is Graphics Specification?
Client Needs
Audience
Thumbnail Sketching
Thumbnails are images that are of a smaller size than the original image. They allow more images to be displayed on a page. Search engines use image thumbnails to display more search results of the page.
Visual Style
Photorealism - Games that are designed to be as realistic as possible, whether fictional or non-fictional. Photorealism is difficult and time-consuming to create, and takes a lot of skill to get the textures and scaling of the world to look realistic.
Notable games that use photorealism include all of the Call Of Duty games, as well as the many Rockstar games.
Cel-Shaded - Designed to look like it was drawn by hand, and is used to represent a cartoon or comic book. Cel-shaded is primarily used by Japanese developers, in games such as Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Dragon Ball Z series.
Exaggerated - Games which are loosely based on Photorealism, but the style is modified, giving the graphics an overdone look. The graphics of the game can make it seem like it is not a serious game, because the characters are outrageously muscular, or features are not proportional, for example: large eyes. Japanese game developers also exaggerate the hair on their characters in anime games, such as Tekken.
Abstract -Games that use geometrical shapes and lines to create a unique visual style. Abstract does not take much skill to create compared to other styles. Abstract games can use both bright colours for fast-paced action, whilst others might use softer colours, which makes the player feel relaxed. An example of an Abstract art style designed game is Geometry Wars.
Military - Usually designed from first person perspective, military games simulate the physics and looks of a battlefield in a war. Characters are designed to look like soldiers, whether present, historic or futuristic. Medal of Honor is a Military game, set in Historic wars, and the more recent conflicts.
Composition
In the visual styles, in particular graphic design composition is the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art, as distinct from the subject of a work. It can also be thought of as the organization of the elements of art according to the principles of art. The term composition means 'putting together,' and can apply to any work of art, from music to writing to photography, that is arranged or put together using conscious thought
Typography
Technical considerations
Compression - Files can be compressed into smaller folders using ZipFile, which allows several different files to be placed into a small folder, which requires to be unzipped before any of the contents can be accessed. This feature makes sharing files through the internet or through a file sharing program, such as an FTP much quicker and simpler.
Optimisation - Optimizing an image file consists of saving the image as a suitable graphic
compression format. Saving an image as a PNG will reduce the file size without losing any data, therefore the photo file has been optimized.
File naming conventions - When you have multiple versions of a file, such as an object, different file names will be helpful in identifying which file name corresponds to each version. For example, a first draft of the main characters might be named "Main character V1.0" and a later version might have a slightly larger number in the name such as "Main character V1.11" because there are 11 different versions.
