Fotonica is a fast-paced, first-person, rail running game developed by Italian game design studio Santa Ragione, made up of Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi. Its visual style is a psychedelic throwback to vector arcade classics like Tempest and cult console favorites like REZ and Space Giraffe:

The game has been called a collision between Tron and Mirror’s Edge, a minimalist and abstracted visit to the old days of vector arcade games and seminal 3d rendering. I spoke with the Santa Ragione team, who also run the LUNARCADE collective, about building the sensational world of Fotonica:

Can you give me just a little background on your team?

Nicolò: We are two but we’re open to any kind of collaboration, as usually happens in small teams; we can’t know everything I guess! I personally have a background in art and Pietro has a background in interaction design. We know each other from quite some time now, more or less 8 years, but we started working on games just two years ago. We shared a passion in gaming, and we talked quite a lot about games and games mechanics in general, so after a while, we started to think about design our own. Santa Ragione was founded a year ago, when we realized we had the opportunity to produce our board game “Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space“. We thought that formalizing into a real studio would have helped us remain motivated.

As I mentioned before, we’re open to collaborations, ether because we need it and because we like it. Michael Manning, Nicolò Sala and Guido Zoppi did a wonderful job on the soundtrack and illustrations for Fotonica, as well as our good friends Mario Porpora and Luca Francesco Rossi did a great job on EFTAIOS. Santa Ragione is two people and is all the people that share this passion with us, at the same time.

What was the inspiration for the visual style of this game?

Nicolò: Well, to name a few we could go from Neuromancer to VibRibbon from Anuszkiewicz’s “Temple of the Radiant Yellow” to REZ. Lets just say we took inspiration from many places, “we like ugly 3D graphics of the ’90s” we said once, and that’s the real core inspiration I guess. Stuff like GERMS for PS1 make us cry tears of joy!

Screenshot from Rez	Temple of the Radiant Yellow by Richard Anuszkiewicz

What tools were used to create the art of Fotonica?

Pietro: Pen and paper! After that it’s a lot of work and improvisation in Blender and C4D for the 3D assets. The game itself was made in Unity3D, an extremely powerful engine/editor that every indie developer should try. There are no textures or 2D elements in Fotonica, aside from the fonts and the beautiful Fotonica face and medals made by Guido Zoppi.

Can you speak, in technical terms, about how the vector-style rendering was achieved?

Pietro: As you suggested it not vector rendering, It’s a full-screen post-processing effect that looks at each polygon’s normal and draws a border of variable thickness where polys intersect. Without going into too much detail, the shader just draws white lines on the surface of polygons, simulating a tessellation, according to the current camera angle. The actual geometry is much simpler than it looks in wireframe mode…

Scaffolding art asset in Cinema 4D	Similar asset in-game

At what point in the development process did you arrive at the current visual style?

Pietro: well the first prototype for the game was made for the “A Game By Its Cover” contest on TIGsource. In the contest we had to make a game inspired by a fake game cover designed for the Famicase Exhibition. As you see it’s white lines on a black background:

Fake game cartridge designed for the Famicase Exhibition.

We fine-tuned the post processing shaders all throughout the development but you can say that we finalized it in time for our public alpha release back in January. The gold mode was introduced in November 2010. when we were still designing the main mechanics of the game. It was a surprise for Nicolò, I secretly implemented it and told him: “play this latest build…“

The levels seem to have slightly different themes (landscapes, scaffolding, emerging blocks). Are there any themes you experimented with that did not make it into the final release?

Nicolò: Good question, there’s a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the final release. It’s not easy to model in a classic flat 3D environment and to keep in mind what will be really visible with the vector shader on. Sometimes stuff works just fine, but most of the time you get strange results; some models are almost invisible, others are good but their shape don’t develop any sense of speed, and so on. In the first level we had train cabins for example, you could run into them and on top of them, but it wasn’t an easy model to adapt to the multi path level. Another theme I worked on for some time was an industrial level, mainly inspired by Bernd and Hilla Becher photography, it’s completely disappeared now. On the other end, other stuff I thought would have looked shitty, totally worked; even some modeling errors turned out to work with the shader, so I started to play with them. Turns out that there’s no right way to do things, but just a functional one.

Nicolò and Pietro, thanks for talking with me about the game.

Fotonica is available for a pay-what-you-want price at the official Fotonica site, or you can play a demo on Kongregate. You can learn more about Santa Ragione at santaragione.com.

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TRAUMA is a unique first person point-and-click adventure game where the environment is assembled from augmented photography instead of conventional 3D graphics. The mood is dark and surreal, as the player explores mysterious dreams of a character that has fallen victim to an automobile accident, filled with hints of her past and clues to her present condition:

TRAUMA was a finalist for the Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio, and Seumas McNally Grand Prize awards in the 2010 Independent Games Festival, as well as a finalist in both IndieCade and European Innovative Games Award in the same year. Creator Krystian Majewski talked with me recently about creating the peculiar and haunting art of the game:

Uncommon Assembly: Krystian, you seem to come from a broad range of artistic disciplines. Can you tell me a little about your background in visual arts?

Krystian: I pretty much grew up learning all sorts of programs like Photoshop and 3D Packages. After high school, I had to decide where to study. There were no specific games courses at that time. So I studied Design at Köln International School of Design. It worked great for me. It’s a school with a uniquely free and open approach to the topic of Design. This is also where the work on TRAUMA started.

So obviously TRAUMA is reminiscent of classic point-and-click adventure games like Myst, but with a much more cinematic quality. In your words, how do you feel the visual experience of the game improves on that genre?

I think old point-and-click adventure games were always about a visual experience. I remember fondly when I saw Myst for the first time. It was in an Apple store. Back then Macs looked like crap. Myst was running on them as a demo for the CD-Rom drive. It was amazing. I couldn’t even process what I was looking at. It was like a computer graphic, but there were no pixels. It blew my mind.

Nowadays, everybody seems to go down the photo-realistic real-time 3D route. That’s cool and there are some great results. But as a side-effect, games tend to look very similar to each other. Also, it seems kinda backwards trying so hard to re-create photorealism in a computer, when it’s so easy to just go out and take a photo.

What game engine did you use?

I used Flash and a free 3D library Papervision 3D. I think it’s a wonderfully easy way to get started with game development nowadays. It’s fairly easy to learn, there is lots of support and you have tons of options on how to release the game when it’s done.

What photographic tools were used to create the art for this game?

I used an “old” Sony DSC-F717 camera I bought on eBay. I love this camera. I swear, the lens must have been forged in the fires of mount doom itself. It does things even some modern, professional DSLR cameras would be jealous of.

As for the post-processing, I used Photoshop, After-Effects and various freeware 3D Tools. Whatever gets the job done. But that was only for the special effects. The actual photos were rarely retouched.

Can you tell me anything about your process for preparing these images for the game?

Well, I went to the locations and looked for ways on how to generate levels out of them. What are the interesting bits? How would players move through the space? Based upon that, I would do the shooting. Back at home I would load the images in a 3D package and arrange them manually in 3D space so that they overlap. Then I would export that into an XML file so my game could read it. Afterwards, I would define how the photos are linked to each other, generate the special effects, do small tweaks, etc.

An early mockup of the first level of TRAUMA in a 3D application.

A map of the connections in the first level of TRAUMA. Images provided by Krystian Majewski.

How did you find the locations for the environments in TRAUMA? And once you found them, was it difficult to map out the routes around the area in a way that would work well as an interactive scene? Did you encounter any problems translating the real-world environments into a game?

Oh yeah, it was super challenging. Mainly because this is not something a game developer is usually confronted with. The first location I wanted to shoot at was a subway station. I didn’t get a permit so I was basically thrown out. Later I would just wander through the city and look for opportunities.

There were a few factors I needed to consider. Of course it needed to be interesting. But there also needed to be at least some kind of light nearby, otherwise the photos wouldn’t look good. And it needed to be fairly deserted so I could do the shooting without being disturbed.

Thanks to Krystian for talking with me about his game. You can purchase TRAUMA on Steam or on the official TRAUMA site, where a free demo is available to play online. You can also visit Krystian on his blog at Game Design Scrapbook.

A Flash image gallery should be here. Please visit Uncommon Assembly to view.

Dutch Angles is a simple sidescrolling arcade game created by Yuliy Vigdorchik and Benjamin Esposito, submitted for the Lunarcade Factory game jam in April 2011. The theme of the jam was “Lines”. Dutch Angles presents what is essentially a 2D game in a more dynamic 3D space, with converging lines and a constantly shifting camera angle, and a very simple color scheme made up of gradients of bold yellows and oranges… small choices that yield strikingly beautiful visualizations at any given point in the game:

Benjamin Esposito spoke with me recently about the art of Dutch Angles:

While the simple & bold visuals were informed by the scope of the game, the main inspiration came from Russian Constructivism. I swear it’s not because Yuliy is Russian… The first version of the game took place between two infinite lines, but as we experimented with camera movement, the bold diagonal strokes reminded me of the forms & colors of those constructivist posters. The yellow and orange motif followed. I also love Yuliy’s particle explosion; it’s the one element that totally disrespects the plane where the gameplay takes place.

Most of the geometry has a self-illuminating specular shader with a red base color. We shine a huge yellow light onto the geometry to get that orange gradient, and it also creates a nice two tone effect for the unlit sides. We also use a distance fog that matches the background color to fade the lines into infinity.

Yuliy and I both came from a 2d background, so a lot of our first 3d projects ended up being 2d games in disguise. When I played Yuliy’s prototype for this game, we came up with a few different mechanics for exploring the 3d space around the game (bending / intersecting lines and stuff). When we started tweaking the main camera’s angle, though, we saw that a continuously changing angle had nauseating / totally rad effects on the gameplay. We settled on this more subtle use of the 3d perspective, and named it Dutch Angles… borrowing the term from cinema.

Thanks to Ben for speaking with me about the game. Dutch Angles is available for free download on Windows, and a little more can be seen about it on TIGsource and the Lunarcade site.

A Flash image gallery should be here. Please visit Uncommon Assembly to view.

Feign, a Flash game developed by Ian Snyder, sends the player on a first-person journey through a 3D maze where positive and negative space are reduced to stark, solid shapes. Every hall, floor, wall, doorway, and ceiling becomes a becomes a minimalist arrangement of contrasting fields, a stripped-down snapshot of abstracted graphic elements. Distance is only perceived by making assumptions about a few converging lines, and not by recognizable objects or atmospheric effects common in other FPS games. There is an old adage: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, and Feign simplifies its world to an extraordinary degree:

Feign was awarded an Honorable Mention in the IGF 2011‘s Nuovo category, which highlights “abstract, short-form, and unconventional game development”. Snyder spoke with me recently about creating the game’s unique environment:

Uncommon Assembly: Can you tell me a little bit about your history? How long have you been making games, and how did you begin creating games?

Ian Snyder: I’ve been making games officially since my freshman year of high school in 2005. My mom was a graphic designer, and she had just bought the Macromedia MX 2004 package with Flash included. I had only recently discovered the internet, and with it flash cartoons. Needless to say, when she mentioned having access to Flash, I was ecstatic. I spent hours with school friends dreaming up characters for our would-be flash animation dynasty. When I actually got into the program, however, I realized I couldn’t animate at all. Instead, I began piddling around with actionscript and soon discovered I was able to make a character move onscreen when a player touched the keys.

I forgot every intention to animate in that moment. When you set up that very first game environment – that lonely, programmer-art box set to wander aimlessly through an empty waste – there’s nothing like it!

So Feign is a Flash game. Can you tell me anything more about the development environment?

Flash is a language – a mother tongue. There are certain things it is well equipped to express, and certain things it is not. This is really the case with anything: Gamemaker, Unity, C++, what have you. As I’ve grown more adept with it over the years, I’ve begun to brush up against its limitations. As I become less limited by my understanding of it, I come to understand how much I am limited by it. I feel that to make a truly great game, you must break the format you’re working with. The best haikus feel more expansive than should logically be able to fit in a haiku. The best flash games don’t feel like Flash games (Machinarium, The Dream Machine, to name a few). Part of the art in making Flash games for me is breaking the development environment to convey my vision for a game.

What tools were used to create the 3D and 2D assets for this game?

I used Papervision for the 3D engine after trying in vain to write my own. The bodies were made with Blender. What little there is in the game of two dimensions was done in the Adobe Flash IDE.

The map was written in actionscript entirely. It’s essentially just a tile-based map like you’d see in early Mario or Zelda games. However, instead of placing tiny 2D square sprites it places cubes. The cubes themselves were Papervision constructs, although I have to write a custom class to suit my needs for them.

In the game, the player walks around structures, through rooms and hallways… a fairly typical 3D interior, but the environment is presented to the player in a somewhat unusual way. In your own words, can you explain how the player is seeing this environment?

The player brings a lot of preconceptions about games to whatever game they are playing, and Feign attempts to exploit these. The game first appears to be nothing more than a 2D menu, not unusual for Flash games. But when the player assumes it’s 2D, Feign has already begun toying with their perception. A little exploration reveals the third dimension, and further exploration reveals that what was assumed to be a fairly straightforward 3D space is actually much more complex. It’s not as though the player is errant to believe these things though, I tried throughout the game to slowly deconstruct the player’s understanding of the game. For that to work, the player needs to believe things that aren’t true.

Feign takes the act of seeing a thing and demonstrates how it can be influenced by things you have already seen. Perception is influenced by memory.

The idea of breaking down the environment into these ambiguous positive and negative shapes is fascinating. What was the inspiration to make a game that is presented in this way, and how was the look of the game conceived?

Perhaps because I grew up playing N64 games and early 3D PC games, I’ve always had a love for flat, untextured 3D surfaces. Early prototypes of the game were experiments in spacial navigation through a black expanse with levels made up of white cubes. There was no shading, no lighting, there were no textures, only color. In that stage, I had the idea to create black boxes as invisible (or, more accurately, perfectly camouflaged) walls. The rest of the game evolved from that point.

Early version of Feign, without background texture and bodies.

From a technical standpoint, what steps did you take to have it rendered in this style?

The environment is defined in a set of 2D arrays like a traditional tile-based game. Each room has one or more portals to other rooms within it. When the player steps onto one of these portals, they are instantly transported to the new room. Because the space around the portals in each room is identical, the transition feels seamless and continuous.

As for the visuals, the flat tones were easy to achieve, simply a matter of not adding any lighting or surface textures. The texture over the game itself is a result of running a single image through a glitch generator (AS3 BitmapData) several times and then collaging the resultant images into a one texture.

Anything more you’d like to share about the prototyping or development process? Any happy accidents along the way?

The whole game was a bit of a happy accident, I think. My original vision for the game was much different than the result, but oddly the result expresses more closely what I wanted to achieve.

Thanks greatly for talking with me about Feign, Ian.

Thanks for your interest in the game.

You can play Feign, and other games, for free on Ian’s site.

A Flash image gallery should be here. Please visit Uncommon Assembly to view.

Devil’s Tuning Fork is an unusual 3D exploration game created by a student team at DePaul University known as the DuPaul Game Elites. The game takes place in the dark, shared subsconcious of children in a coma, where the player must use waves of sound to illuminate their surroundings. The goal is to free yourself and other children who are imprisoned in this alternate reality and find the cause of the mysterious epidemic.

Visually, Devil’s Tuning Fork is a uniquely mesmerizing and somewhat disorienting journey into the unreal…where the world around you pulses, shifts, and fades away almost as quickly as it appears:

A few of the DePaul Game Elites members joined me recently to talk about creating the facinating world of Devil’s Tuning Fork, including Richard Kossak (Art Lead), Kyle Sullivan (Visual Design Lead), and Kevin Geisler (Graphics/AV Programmer). Special thanks to producer Matt Lazar for arranging the interview:

Uncommon Assembly: First off, amazing work on this project. Can you tell me a little bit about the background of your team?

Richard: Our team is made up entirely of DePaul University students. We have six artists, six programmers, two designers, and a producer. This is the first time DePaul has set up a class with intentions of creating a game for the Student Showcase of the Independent Games Festival. It was the brainchild of our game designer in residence, Alex Seropian, co-founder of Bungie. For many of us, this is the first game we’ve ever worked on. I can’t speak for Kyle, but after this experience I am definitely hooked.

Devil’s Tuning Fork is really unlike any game I’ve ever seen before. Can you tell me what the inspiration was for such a bizarre and fantastical world?

Kyle: The echolocation theme came about during a brainstorming session in our concept phase. We realized that the idea had innovative merit because it was all about perceiving the world in a new way. Simply put, our game made the act of looking at things fun again. Our very first prototype consisted only of a sound wave and a cube, but the cube looked awesome. We knew we wanted to develop a world around the premise of having fun looking at stuff. However, we really had no go-to references for how we wanted the game to look, since our own game was based on a pretty abstracted version of what real echolocation was actually like. Scientific research was little help, and we had a hard time finding media references we liked (there was an old Magic School Bus episode about sound visualization, but it was pretty wonky), so developing the visuals became an iterative process.

Richard: Yeah, we’ve had quite a few seemingly random inspirations for this game, including the echolocation abilities of dolphins and M.C. Escher’s wood etchings. We wanted to create a visual style that people haven’t seen before which required a long process of experimentation. We, as artists, would decide on a direction to try, the programming team would recreate it in-engine, then we’d see that maybe it doesn’t look as good as we had hoped. Although there were moments of frustration, we iterated until we came up with new solutions that led us to new routes we hadn’t previously considered.

What kind of tech was involved in creating this game? What engine and visualization/rendering technology was involved?

Kevin: As far as tech goes, we really tried to blend a lot of different techniques in order to create something different. We used the QE Engine which is an academic engine built by Professor Joe Linhoff at DePaul University. The shading technology itself went through several iterations trying to balance both performance and creative vision.

Essentially, the visuals are accomplished by creating spherical lights that dynamically grow to simulate a moving sound wave. To make these waves more aesthetically pleasing when they overlap, we incorporated a lot of blending and fading techniques. For the stripes, we discussed procedurally generating them, but to keep our performance at a good level, we went with textures.

So the moving stripes are all scrolling textures, that are then “lit” by the growing lights?

Richard: Yes, the stripes are a texture that the artists made, which is then moved via code. They are meant to give the feeling of energy as well as resembling the hatching technique Escher uses.

What can you tell me about the prototyping process used to develop the unique look of this game? It’s quite unusual, and I would imagine the artists, coders, and designers had to work very closely to realize such an unconventional visual style.

Richard: It was definitely a learning experience. It’s always tough taking the collective visions of 15 people and trying to combine them into one cohesive experience. I do have to say, though, that as difficult as this process could have been, our team worked really well together.

Kyle: Prototyping was certainly a team effort – making a game about echolocation, and making it fun and innovative, was everyone’s responsibility. Since Devil’s Tuning Fork is a game about perception, we knew that the visuals would be intimately tied with the gameplay mechanics. In the early stages of development, we had many round-table discussions regarding what exactly our game would look and play like. We would break the team up into cross-discipline “strike teams” and brainstorm different visualization systems. Once we had several concepts we liked, it was up to Richard and I to quickly prototype sound ping visualizations in Maya. We probably made a few dozen of these animatics, iterating on them each time. Once our visualizations were refined enough, the programmers would take these references and attempt to replicate their look in the game engine.

Refining the look was also as much about solving problems as it was about creating a unique style. Since we were trying to achieve a new mode of perception, we wanted to avoid as much as possible using properties of light in the game engine. This meant no shadows and no highlights. Unfortunately, this flattened the image and made it hard to differentiate things on-screen. Luckily, using Escher as a primary artistic influence provided us with a solution to this problem. Looking at his woodcuts, we realized that striped hatching lines were an excellent way of conveying the form of three-dimensional objects without relying on lighting. At the same time, by studying Escher we also learned which volumetric objects are most aesthetically pleasing when combined with a hatching look.

As far as student teams go, this was a pretty large group… 15 members in all. Was it difficult to get everyone on board such a crazy idea? A 6-month dev cycle is relatively tight.

Richard: This is a pretty united group. In order to participate in the DePaul Game Elites, each student had to go through a selective application process. Because of this, I think all members on the team felt an obligation to create a game that hasn’t been seen before. DePaul University gave us all a great opportunity to be a part of this project.

Kyle: Yeah, I think everyone who made the cut felt like they had earned their spot on the team. The chance to work with an industry veteran like Alex Seropian was also a once-in-a-lifetime experience. On top of that, here was our free ticket to do whatever crazy idea we wanted before we graduated. Our excitement for the project allowed us to maintain a high energy level throughout the entire six-month development process.

How important was it to your team to create such a highly stylize game?

Richard: Since the beginning of this project, the goal has been to create an innovative game that challenges the player to experience something that they haven’t experienced in a game before. On day one of the brainstorming sessions, we all agreed that we didn’t want to make “just another game”; we wanted to push the envelope. I think this mentality helped us in making such a unique experience for the player.

Unlike many student games, Devil’s Tuning Fork’s art feels very polished. The art style is cohesive and clean, and feels very finished. To what or whom do you attribute this?

Richard: The art team has definitely been working hard for the past six months. We’ve had numerous 10:00 a.m. -11:00 p.m. work days, creating and polishing assets for the game. I’d like to think that it’s all because of my great organization and motivational skills as the Art Lead on the project, but I can’t take all the credit. We’ve really worked well together as a team.

Kyle: As Visual Design Lead, maintaining a cohesive look was a top priority of mine. I had never been in such a role before, so it was definitely a challenge to coordinate a project like this. As a team, we knew we had a wicked cool art style, and we didn’t want to lose it during the production process. We would never have gotten anywhere if it weren’t for the guidance of Scott Roberts, our faculty art advisor. Throughout the project, he constantly challenged the art team to really push the game’s design and aesthetic elements.

Of course, through our iterative development process all of the artists became acquainted with the visual style. We all took part in learning what worked and what didn’t. I’m reminded of David O’Reilly’s essay, Basic Animation Aesthetics. O’Reilly argues that in order to maintain aesthetic cohesion it is necessary to establish strict design rules. While we didn’t start off abiding by rules—nobody had the answers ahead of time—we basically created our own aesthetic through experimentation and iteration. I realize now that what made the visual design of the game so successful is that we were eventually able to define our aesthetic rules in hard terms and carry those rules out across all artistic assets. Here are some of the hard-written list of aesthetic rules that we established for maintaining a cohesive visual design:

• Stripe patterns should all flow in a unified direction: stripes on walls should flow downwards (with the exception of Level 3, in which the verticality of the level called for upward flowing stripes. Stripes on floors should flow in the direction of the next exit, to direct players towards their goal.
• Stripe patterns shouldn’t be random – they should run either horizontally or vertically. No diagonal stripes.
• If a shape has some kind of detail that needs to be conveyed, it is better to think about creating a meaningful silhouette rather than to try to shrink the stripe patterns to fit the detail. Stripes need to follow a uniform size.
• Shapes need to be juxtaposed. Rounded columns need to be offset at the ends by square bases or thick lips. Moulding should be used at wall corners to break up the shape of the room, and at door frames to emphasize the door frame’s shape.
• Escher was inspired by Italian Renaissance architecture. This style emphasized mathematical forms. This meant that most forms we used should be able to be broken down into basic geometric shapes. Clean shapes are valued over organic shapes.

So where do the DePaul Game Elites go from here?

Richard: The model established by the DePaul Game Elites will become a yearly program here at DePaul University. It would be really great to give more students this opportunity to participate in a development cycle modeled after professionals in the industry.

Kyle: I’ll actually be a bit disappointed once this project is over. When you’re around the same people for six months, everyone falls into a groove. Right now we’re at a stage where work simply gets done because everyone is comfortable with their roles. Given the opportunity, I’d love to see what we could accomplish outside of the IGF competition.

And what’s next for Devil’s Tuning Fork?

Richard: Well, we plan to continue working on Devil’s Tuning Fork, improving what we can and taking into account any feedback we receive through the website. We check those suggestions every day and value the input from our players.

Kyle: I’m really surprised at the amount of attention our game as gotten. I would have been perfectly happy walking away from this project with only the experience I gained through it, but it seems like Devil’s Tuning Fork has generated quite a bit of buzz basically overnight. I feel like we’ve got a good thing going here, and the influx of YouTube views and indie blog postings has re-energized me to continue improving the game over winter break.

Thanks again for taking the time to talk with me about the amazing visuals behind Devil’s Tuning Fork, fellas. Good luck with IGF in 2010.

For more information on Devil’s Tuning Fork, including concept art, music, team membersand the DePaul Game Elites, and to download the game, visit the official Devil’s Tuning Fork website.

All images copyright DePaul Game Elites (with permission):

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Painterly approaches to video game art are nothing new, though most attempts in the past have been to simply apply painted textures to models using fairly conventional rendering techniques.  In 2006, Clover Studio developed Okami, which featured a groundbreaking display of Japanese sumi-e art, and has since been the hailed as the finest achievement in bringing a classical artistic sensibility to video games. Then, in 2008, lone indie developer Eskil Steenberg, under the moniker Quel Solaar, began releasing screenshots and videos from a project called Love:

Love is a strategic MMO about defending a community from an empirical overlord. Steenberg has relied heavily on procedural generation of maps, characters, and scenarios… a world that builds itself and constantly unfolds to offer an endless number of possible environments and conflicts.  All rendered in a phenomenally lush, impressionistic style.

Steenberg is an immensely talented and visionary developer who truly seems to understand that drama isn’t just conveyed by narrative alone. He states on the Love website: “You won’t be told a story, but you will get to live one.” This kind of attention to developing immersive experiences manifests itself in the art as well, foregoing minute detail and slick materials for vague and emotive impressions. What results is a far more evocative experience than much of what we’ve seen before. I’m very excited to see more on this game:

All images copyright Eskil Steenberg/Quel Solaar:

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Love doesn’t appear to have a release time just yet. For more, visit the Love website, and see a great article over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Fig8, by Intuition Games, is a Flash game that borrows heavily from the aesthetics of architectural and technical blueprints. The game began as a student art installation before evolving into a game (full story at Intuition’s site). It’s basically a top-down bicycling game where the player literally rides through patent-inspired design documents. Beautiful:

Basically, the player drives as long as they can without hitting something, while the viewing area automatically scrolls. The longer you ride, the more points you accumulate. Extra points can be gained by keeping the individuals tracks of the wheels overlayed. Your points are displayed to you as text notations that you drive by. The choice of font seemed particularly crucial to the developers, who eventually settled on Sirenne Eighteen MVB. Definitely a good choice. There’s a great interview with Greg and Mike about Fig. 8 over at the IndieGames.com (including a link to an awesome image of the entire map), and you can play now at Yo! Arcade.

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What struck me at first about IGF 2009 contestant Dyson is that I had a hard time deciding if the world I’m playing in is on the micro- or macro- scale. The game tells you that you are using seedlings to populate asteroids, but the asteroids themselves seem almost cellular. Either way, I was also struck by the very minimalist and utterly beautiful art for this game. Heavy in strategy, you start with a small group of flying “seedlings” populating an asteroid. You can cash in some of these seedlings and grow trees with them… some trees produce more seedlings, and some trees produce defensive spore-like missiles. To complete each level, you must populate other asteroids in an asteroid belt, while conquering an opposing army of seedlings, and defending your asteroids from them.

The game was named after physicist Freeman Dyson (b. 1923), a true renaissance man who studied and formulated ideas about everything from theoretical physics to nuclear engineering to quantum field theory (which is really just the tip of the iceberg). Dyson proposed the creation of a Dyson tree, a genetically-engineered plant capable of growing on an asteroid.

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I’m a huge fan of infographics, charts, and other ways of visualizing data, and Dyson seems like a wonderful combination of gaming and the artistic sensibilities of infographic design:

(source: Visual Complexity)

The official Dyson site can be found at dyson-game.com, and TIGSource has great interviews about the project with both creators, Rudolf Kremers and Alex May. Collectively, they keep a Dyson developer diary. Dyson will be available on Steam in October 2009. While you’re waiting, enjoy a beautiful video documenting the developer’s tests with tree growth logic. I just can’t stop watching it: