Environment Design as Visual Storytelling: Theory and Practice

[Music] hi everyone thank you very much for coming to my talk on environment design as visual storytelling so before we get into the uh talk proper a little bit about myself so my name is miriam ballard and and i'm the art director for visual development at rockstar games so i have a background in architecture and film as well as video games so i hold a first-class honours degree in architecture from auckland university in new zealand um the highlight of my film career would have been as a set designer on king kong so that was a peter jackson film filmed in new zealand and the highlight of my video game career is most definitely my current job at rockstar however i haven't just worked on big budget and triple a i started my film career working on short films music videos and low budget

productions and i started my video game career at an indie studio and i returned to indie work in the middle of my career as well so this talk isn't just aimed at big budget and triple a this talk is aimed at everybody within rockstar i lead a team of visual development artists and they all come from similar backgrounds to myself so architecture interior design film set design concept art things like that this is the type of work that my team does so our focus is on environment pre-production so we're doing architectural layouts set dressing passes reference boards and so on so our role as a department is to make sure that designs are going to work for everybody so they need to work for game design for environment art for art direction for animation ai the narrative team and so on so this talk is a companion talk to one

that i did a couple of years ago now and that talk was on environment design and spatial cinematography so when you are designing you need to design for a number of different criteria you need to design for spatial cinematography but also visual storytelling which i'm going over today player interaction aesthetics and practicalities so a good design is going to take all of these into account sometimes we do need to make some compromises but it all needs to work so moving on to the talk proper so environment design is visual storytelling so a good way to get into this is to think about our role here so we are very much like actors and actresses and that we are playing a part in creating a character the biggest difference between us and actors and actresses is that is the medium that we have to work in so they are working with their own bodies and their own physicality whereas we are

using the environment in order to create our characters so the talk today is going to be a very fast-paced talk i'm going to be going over quite a lot of different points this is this is very much a broad overview those points are going to be grouped into four sections so we have mimesis which is all about mimicking and copying reality semiotics which is all about signs and symbols and how we communicate cognition which is about neuroscience and psychology and then we're going to end on some aspects of the structure of your visual storytelling now for advanced people in the audience um some aspects of the mimesis section are going to be a little bit basic for you but i ask if you'll just bear with me because there'll be more for you in other sections [Music] so if you want to know more when the talk's over i will be putting a bibliography up on my website that will cover not just the

references that i'm going to bring up during this talk but also other things on the topic as well so starting now with mimesis so this is all about mimicking and copying reality so a good way to start here is with role playing so when you're engaging with a design you want to think about who are the characters that were involved what resources did they have to hand what um what was their taste what was their interest you know what was the fashion at the time and then who came later what were their needs their taste their interests what um environmental factors were in play as well and so you really want to think through all the different layers of history and all the different characters now sometimes that will lead you to designing something like this which is of course a piece of contemporary architecture but more often than not we're going to be designing something that looks much more

old-fashioned and historic or that looks completely undesigned so here the storytelling is you know an underground bunker space is not supposed to look architecturally designed so even though it was designed by an architect we can't make it look like that again we are actors and actresses and we're playing a part [Music] so all the images i'm going to be showing you today are all from gta 5 or gta 5 online dlc that is i should say all the in-game images so next under mimesis so again mimesis is all about mimicking and copying reality next we have personality so this book here which is by an environmental psychologist he talks about how a how your personality is portrayed in a space so he talks about behavioral traces identity claims and mood modifiers so behavioral traces are the traces that you leave behind in an environment as

you use that environment so they are of course things like mess and clutter but it's also things like a couch or a chair under a window or next to a lamp because somebody is using it to read or to write um so next under personality we have identity claims so identity claims are the claims that people are making about themselves and that can be self-directed so you could be reminding yourself who you are or it can be other directed so you're letting other people know who you are so they are of course things like photographs on the wall or certificates but it's also things like the your choice of artwork that you have up or the types of objects that you have up so are you somebody who has authentic traditional arcade cabinets or are you somebody who has modern modern reinvention of an arcade cabinet

to show how modern and cutting edge you are so next under personality we have mood modifiers so these are things that people are doing in order to adjust their mood so a lot of this is happening in the audio in terms of the music that people choose to play but it's also happening in the visuals as well so it can be things like candles or incense or the colors that people choose to paint their walls now it's not just about being calming it's also it can also be about amping up the volume as well so next under mimesis so mimicking and copying reality we have affordances so affordances are the actions that an object allows so a chair affords sitting a car affords driving and a door affords opening so we normally think about affordances in terms of interactivity and gameplay however affordances have storytelling components as well

so to start out with an extreme example so let's say you have a seller and in one version of that seller you have a torture chair and in another version you have wine barrels now as i'm i'm sure you're aware the storytelling is going to be very very different in those two now that is the case even if the torture chair and the wine barrels are not actually functional in your game the it's the affordances from the real world that are adding the storytelling so to take a less extreme example let's say in one space we have a lot of furniture and then the other we don't have any so the affordances of furniture are of course that it's there for human use uh you can sit in chairs and you can be comfortable so that is the storytelling that it's adding to the space the sense of welcome that this space is for humans and that sense of comfort as well now that is the case again even if um the um those are not

functional and in your game this is about the affordances from the real world that's what's providing the storytelling [Music] so next under mimesis so mimicking and copying reality we have sizes so sizes affect how we see the materials and structure so here with these two bridges a steel bridge is going to have very different sizes and spans in comparison to a masonry bridge however if i look at a slightly more subtle example so on the left you are looking at a the steel structure that's in a tunnel leading to a missile silo and in the right that's the steel structure for an air for an airplane hangar now the structure on the left is much thicker and much chunkier because it has to withstand the shaking from the missiles from the missile when it takes off so again the different sizes here are communicating the different functions

so sizes also affect how we see the characters so to start out with stair sizes so these are normal stair sizes and the character looks very normal however these here are oversized stairs and what the effect that oversized stairs does is it makes these characters look small and weak and childlike as they're climbing up the stairs now it's perfectly acceptable to do this if that's your intention if you want your characters to look small and weak then by all means have oversized stairs but quite often in game we have if not heroic characters at least powerful characters and the last thing we want to do is to make them look small and weak so as a public service announcement the size of stairs is in proportion to a human stride as the rise gets higher the run gets shorter because it's the rise and run to give together

that are in proportion to a human stride so there are equations for this online this is just one from wikipedia so interestingly enough you could take the stride length here the human stride length and you could replace it with the stride length of say a dwarf or a giant or another non-human race and in doing so you could actually make stairs that were correctly proportioned for non-human races for sci-fi and fantasy games so this isn't just about stair sizes this is any anything that is about human ergonomics and human proportions and anatomy so it's things like chair heights table heights desk heights counter heights bar heights that kind of thing if you have any of those too big what you're going to do is create this kind of mini mini me effect on the character now this can actually be a bit of a practical problem

so if we look at here the first picture on the left that chair is a 100 real world size in many games that is going to look too small it's just not going to have enough presence on screen whereas the middle one we've enlarged that but that now is now having this mini-me effect on the character however the one on the right what we've done is we've scaled the width and scaled the depth but we've kept the height at 100 real world and so that is giving us more on-screen presence but it's not having the mini-me effect on the character so next under the mesa so the section was all about mimicking and copying reality next we have layout so if we look at these two buildings here the first one is a us building from the early 1900s the second is a uk building from the 1800s so there are a lot of differences between them so obviously

one's freestanding the other is a part of the other is a row house one has wood one's made out of brick they've got different cells windows and doors and so on and but another extremely important difference is their layout so that first house you're entering directly into the lounge and you have this very interconnected layout whereas the second one you enter into the corridor and the corridor and the stairs create a linear spine through the building and everything comes off the corridors now if you were to mix up those two and if you had that corridor in the very first one you would completely undermine the visual storytelling of that space so it's just as important the same way that you would research say things like the style of doors and windows that would go in a particular style of building you also need to research the layout for that style of building now i'm going to take a slight tangent for a second

so if you remember right at the beginning of the talk i spoke about how we need to design for multiple different criteria and uh not just visual storytelling what's very possible that a layout like this would have issues when it comes to both the spatial cinematography side and also the player interaction side because a linear layout like this with lots of dead ends is going to mean lots of turning round for the player and lots of stop and stopping and starting and it's not going to be very fluid movement so what we would probably do or look at doing in a space like this again depending on the gameplay of course but more than likely we're going to be end up adding some extra doors in order to create looping layouts now this of course does undermine this visual storytelling to some extent but what we're trying to do is we're trying to make things work for the other criteria as well and have as little

impact here on the visual storytelling as we can so what we're not going to do is we're not going to walk we're not going to change this into a completely open planned layout we're not going to walk directly into the lounge like the other one we're just going to make as small and as subtle changes as possible in order to make this work so to sum up now the mimesa section so the section was all about mimicking and copying reality we had role playing which is thinking through our different characters and the layers of history our personality was all about identity claims mood modifiers and i have forgotten one of them behavioral traces that's right affordances that's the actions that an object allows and that the real world affordances affects the in-game storytelling sizes affect how we see materials and structure and also how we see the characters and finally it's

as important to research your layout as any other aspect of a design so next up we're going to talk about semiotics so semiotics are all about signs and symbols and how we communicate so a good introduction to semiotics is this painting by magritte so what the text on this painting says is this is not a pipe that is entirely accurate this is not a pipe this is a painting of a pipe in fact if i'm going to be particularly pedantic this is a digital representation of a painting of a pipe now magritte was very interested in semiotics and this actually was what he was referring to here so at its heart with semiotics we have signifiers and what is signified so the painting here is a signifier and what it is signifying is the pipe itself so we have a number of different types of signifiers we have symbols icons and

indexes so before i get into actually explaining these just to point out to the more advanced people in the audience that the examples i'm going to be giving here all of them are things that you're familiar with already so what's new or useful here is actually the words and the structure in order to explain what it is that we're doing already rather than adding anything new here in terms of actual practice so a symbol signifier is a signifier that is culturally arbitrary and needs to be learnt so language is the classic example here so in order to understand that the english word rose means a rose we need to understand english you know we can't just figure that out i can't look at any of those words from the other languages and know that they mean a rose in terms of visuals something like a traffic light would be an example of a symbol signifier again this is

culturally arbitrary you need to learn it you can't just guess by looking at the traffic light what it means so in terms of in-game examples so texts and plaques and things like that that we have in game are examples of symbol signifiers and when we use logos and cultural references in the game those are all symbol signifiers as well and so the more the player understands the cultural references the more the player will understand the signifier so an icon signifier is a signifier that physically resembles what it is signifying so male and female icons and also of course this picture by magritte so the painting itself was an icon signifier and what again what it was signifying was the pipe so the painting looks like the pipe which is what makes it an icon so icon signifiers would be the most common type of signifier in game

so here we've looked to what modern contemporary casinos look like and a contemporary hotels and we've applied that knowledge to to the design of this building so this building simply looks like a modern casino and so that would be the most common um type of signifier in game so an index signifier is a signifier where we have a length or causal relationship between at the signifier and the signified so here the smoke is an index signifier and what is signified is the fire that's causing the smoke so an in-game example would be all the money and drugs and alcohol that you're seeing lying around here all of those are index signifiers which communicate what the player and the characters have been doing and so to move away from theory for a second and to talk about just about practice we have a co the concept of aesthetic

language so most of you are going to be familiar with the term shape language so by aesthetic language i am meaning something a bit broader however let's start with shape language to begin with so you will also be familiar i'm sure with the use of shape language in sci-fi and fantasy where you might say have round shapes that you associate with the buildings and the vehicle designs and so on of one particular race and then sharp angular shapes that you associate with another race and by having different shapes for different races it makes it easy to tell them apart well you can use shape language in realistic designs as well so let's say we were designing either some art deco moldings or some colonial moldings what you could do in order to design mouldings that fit within those styles but that were fresh new mouldings is you could look to the shapes of those moldings understand those shapes and then do something in

the same language so with the art deco ones you're looking at the fact that they're made out of rectangle squares and simple curves and the colonial ones are of course much more complex shapes and so that is the way we've approached this design here so this brutalist design on the right looked to existing and and proposed uh real world brutalist designs and it didn't copy any of them it didn't copy any particular parts what it did was it looked at the kinds of shapes that you see in those and we learnt the shapes and then created something new using those shapes now this is the same approach you can take if you say want to design a piece of furniture within a particular style or even if you want to do some art some artwork in the style of a particular artist so another useful another good use for shape language is when doing

construction and structure so that was the approach taken here and we looked to marine architecture in order to create this design and so again this was done using shape language so it treated it likely with those moldings learnt the language of the shapes and created something in that language now there is another way we could have approached this design we could have instead done it through a more role-playing approach with that approach you were designed like an engineer would and you would design it following principles about construction structure the forces and so on now there are advantages and disadvantages to the two approaches the advantage of the role-playing approach is that the final design is going to be much more realistic the advantage of the shape language approach is that it's faster it's more fluid is much easier to be creative and to make things up and of course you don't need the same level of knowledge as you do for the role-playing approach

now a good design we'll usually use we usually always use aspects of both so it will use some aspects of role playing and some amount of shape language and how much you lean towards one and how much you lean towards another will depend on the needs of the project or the needs of that particular design so how important is realism versus how important is speed and creativity so as mentioned this is broader than just shape language so by calling this aesthetic language what i'm meaning is that everything that you can do there with shapes you can do with other aspects of aesthetics as well so you can look at your reference in terms of the level of density how sparse is it or how dense and detailed is it and you can learn that that level of detail and create something again

following the same aesthetic language here so you can do that with cohesion as well so how cohesive or not is it is it like the one on the left where we're getting a lot of repetition of shapes and colors and a limited palette so it's more cohesive or does it have more variety like the one on the right and also what kind of colors are you seeing you know what what are the actual hues what kind of variety are there how limited is the palette and other colors coming from the objects or from the lighting also what level of order are you seeing is it simple order like the image on the left complex order like in the center or is it chaotic like on the right now it's also important to consider the different layers as well so here both of these images look very chaotic however the one on the left the chaos is all coming from the set dressing and the architecture is actually quite ordered however the one

on the right the whole the architecture itself is chaotic as well so when you're analyzing the space that your spaces and the reference need to be looking at all these different aspects in the different layers so what's the architecture doing what's the set dressing doing and what's the 2d graphics doing and then when you analyze it all of those layers for all the different aspects so shapes colors textures cohesion order chaos and so on then you can learn the language and start creating something by speaking in that language and of course like we mentioned earlier with the shape language you want to mix this with some role-playing because if you don't have any of the role-playing in there then the the space won't be quite as solid and real so but how much role-playing will of course depend on the needs of the project so finally under semiotics i'm going to talk about tropes so i'm not meaning

here the use of this term that we are most familiar with which is of course an overused cliche instead i'm meaning the use of this term that you see in literary theory or semiotic theory so there um tropes simply means figurative language so it's figurative language in general rather than just a cliche so there are a lot of different examples of tropes that you see in literary and semiotic theory i'm just going to go over a few today so metonymy is when you use something is when you're referring to something that is related so in other words you could use the white house to refer to the u.s administration synecdoche on the other hand is when you're using a part to refer to a hole so we could use the eiffel tower to refer to paris or to france and then metaphor on the other hand is when you are comparing two seemingly unrelated things so for example i could

say he has a sunny disposition there i'm comparing two things which are seemingly unrelated the fact the sun and then this person's disposition and by comparing them i'm adding shades of meaning onto one of those things so i'm changing how we see him now we can do that kind of metaphor visually as well so this one here is using shape metaphors but we could have also made metaphors with things like colors or textures or lighting or anything else as well so the first the one on the left is using circular shaped metaphors and the one on the right are jagged angular shapes so the circular shapes are going to remind us of things like rolling hills bushes fruit babies other humans it's all nice things and friendly things and so that is the meaning that gets applied to the space the one on the right however the angular

the angular shapes reminders of things like broken bones clef edges teeth claws it's all things which are far less pleasant and so it's those kind of associations that then that's the meaning that gets applied to this space and by the way i'm going to go over the science of that in the next section but to sum up semiotics first so semiotics was all about signs and symbols and how we communicate at its heart it's about signifiers and what is signified we talked about the different types of signifiers so icons are indexes and um symbols and then then we went on to aesthetic language so we talked about shape language and we extended that into other aspects of aesthetics and then we finally ended on tropes which was how we can have figurative language and how that can be done visually so next we're going to talk about cognition so this section is all about

neuroscience and psychology so first up we're going to talk about associations and this is the science behind the tropes that we just covered but before we get into that i do just want to talk a little bit about the science that i mentioned in my previous talk so in that talk i talked about evolutionary theory and habitat theory and how we evolved to like and dislike certain things because it helped our ancestors to survive so i still think that science is accurate and it's definitely useful in some areas especially things like where what players will avoid and what players will move towards however when it comes to visual storytelling the associations that i'm going to go over today feel far more useful and more applicable and much broader as well so this is something of an update on the science from my previous talk [Music] so this lecture here which by the way is

a fascinating lecture and i'd highly recommend watching it's a neuroscientist talking about aesthetics so in that lecture he talks about synesthesia so synesthesia is a mixing of the senses and the most common form of synesthesia is when people see numbers as having a color so if i was to ask show this diagram to someone with number color synesthesia and if i was to ask them uh what shape the twos are making because this is a mixture of fives and twos they would immediately be able to tell me that the twos make up a triangular shape and the reason they could tell me so quickly is because for them the twos are tinted a different color to the fives and so of course they can see that shape straight away now what's going on in the brain of a synesthesia is that so early on in the brain's development we have a lot of extra neural connections as the brain develops

a lot of those get cut in the brain of a synesthesia some of the connections that get cut and the rest of us um don't get cut for them so with someone and it's not that surprising that number color synesthesia is the most common because numbers and colors are right next to each other in the brain so what's going on in the brain with somebody with number color synesthesia is that when the number gets triggered in the brain there is a hard-wired connection to the colored part of the brain there's automatically triggering a color as well [Music] so this kind of mixing of the senses is something that all of us do to some extent so if i was to show you all these shapes and tell you that one of these shapes is called bouba and one of these shapes is called kiki the vast majority of you are going to say that the first sharp shape is called kiki and the second soft shape is called bouba because a sharp shape obviously goes with a sharp word and a

soft shape obviously goes with a soft word however this is a mixing of the senses we are mixing here shapes with sounds so interestingly enough synesthesia is actually eight times more common in people with creative roles compared to people with more technical roles so the reason for this is is that being able to create links between seemingly unrelated things is at the heart of creativity it's also the very definition of metaphors which we described before with a metaphor we are relating seemingly unrelated things and so that is exactly what's going on in the brain when we make these kind of visual metaphors what we are doing is making connections in the brain between things which are seemingly unrelated in order for the meaning and associations of one to be applied to the other [Music] it is also important to be aware that

there are cultural differences but some water first okay so in this lecture here this is a psychologist talking about aesthetics so he talks about a number of different studies that together create an interesting picture so in the first study he looked at how much people liked or disliked different colors so the bright blue that you're seeing at the top right everybody likes that and the dirty yellow in the bottom left everyone dislikes that next he looked at what people associate with those different colors so that bright blue was associated with the sky and that dirty yellow was associated with vomit and next he looked at how much people liked or disliked the things that were associated with those colors so how much do people like the sky and how much do people like vomit and next he compared how much people liked the colors or disliked them and how much they like to dislike to the

things associated with those colors so to give a layman's interpretation of his results 80 percent of how much we like or dislike a certain color is coming from how much we like or dislike the things associated with that color so again laban's interpretation here 80 percent of the visual storytelling of a color is coming from what we associate with that color so next he did a study of different cultures so he looked at japan us mexico and serbia and looked at the color preferences in those different countries so every single country liked a nice sky blue and every single country disliked a vomit yellow however when it came to the other colors there was a lot more variety so what this tells us as visual designers is that when we're making associations so when we're making references if we're referencing something that is a universal human

experience in the same way that the sky is a universal human experience and vomit is a universal human experience uh if that's what we're referencing then then we can be confident that everyone will understand us however if we're referencing things which are a bit more culturally specific then not everyone's going to understand us so in terms of what to do about that sometimes we don't need to do anything at all sometimes some aspects of visual storytelling are sometimes in there just to create an extra richness to a design but sometimes it is important that people understand and when this is the case what we need to do is we need to communicate via multiple channels so we need to communicate via you know like not just colors but maybe shapes as well or textures or maybe you look to other sections of this talk and maybe you add an index signifier or a icon signifier because those aren't culturally specific

so next we're going on to spatial metaphors so what's going on in the brain here is that the brain creates um social cognitive maps so the brain takes the neural infrastructure that was developed in order to understand and navigate the physical environment and the brain has co-opted that in order to understand and navigate the social environment so if i were so i could say something like somebody is close to me somebody else has been distant recently somebody else is above me at work somebody else is ahead of me at school all of those are spatial metaphors used to describe social relationships and so this article here goes into the science more if anyone's interested and again all of these references will be on my website so what's interesting is that kind of social spatial metaphor is obviously

what's going on in terms of why film high shots and low shots work so when the camera is above the character it mimics being spatially above and therefore socially above the character and the reverse when the camera is below so when so when the person is socially below you obviously it makes them look weak and socially above you obviously it makes them look strong so we can't normally control cameras to this extent in a video game but what we can do is we can set up the spaces in order to create the same storytelling so here we can simply have the um create the the space so that the character is simply above or below other characters and for us in video games this is an area rich with potential as well uh 3d games are so fundamentally spatial that we really have a lot to play with here so next under cognition so we're talking

about all about neuroscience and psychology in this section next we have the concept of peak shift so before i go into peak shift though i want to talk first about caricature so caricature is when we take the features of somebody and we exaggerate the features that that are different to normal so lincoln's ears are bigger than average ears and so the character tourist has made them even bigger and often this kind of uh caricature can be easier to read especially quickly and at a glance compared to far more realistic representations so the science of peak shift explains why that's the case but first we don't just get this kind of visual hyperbole just in character so an example in art might would be something like this indian statue from the 19th century here what the artist has done is they've taken the difference between a male and

female figure and they've exaggerated those differences so in the same way you could immediately tell that that was a picture of lincoln here you can immediately tell that you're looking at a statue of a woman rather than a man [Music] so an in-game example so this is gta 5 dlc here we've taken the difference between somebody with a lot of money and somebody who doesn't and we've exaggerated that difference and so by having all of this money lying around we can immediately see how rich and well off the player is so even in the base gta 5 game that hasn't gotten as extreme as some of the dlc even there what we're doing is we're focusing on the interesting bits we're cutting out the boring bits and we're really concentrating on the areas that give us good storytelling and by doing that we're creating something that is hyper real rather than real

so the science behind why this kind of visual hyperbole can be easier to understand than something that's more realistic the science behind that is the concept called peak shift so that is from the same video that i mentioned before he he goes over a couple of different studies in this video there's not time to go over both of them now so i'm just going to talk about one of them so a rat was given a rec a square and a rectangle and the rectangle had more cheese so of course the rat started preferring going to the rectangle what was interesting is when the rat was introduced to a far more extreme rectangle the rat immediately preferred going to the more extreme rectangle and that is because the rat didn't learn the a particular size and shape of rectangle equals cheese what the rat learnt instead was that rectangleness equals cheese and so when it saw a more extreme rectangle the rat assumed more

cheese and so that is what's going on with this kind of thing here we don't remember that the size and we don't remember the exact size and shape of lincoln's ears instead we remember that they are larger than normal and so when that gets exaggerated it makes it easier to read and so that's why visual hyperbole can be much easier to read and understand rather than being purely realistic so next under cognition so this section is all about neuroscience and psychology next we have gestalt but before i get into gestalt i want to talk first about affinity and contrast so these are concepts from film and there's more about them in this book here and what affinity and contrast are so affinity is when things are similar and a contrast is when they're different

affinity can be used to communicate social cohesion and bonding and contrast can be used to communicate conflict so here in the still from edward scissorhands we have a lot of similarity and therefore affinity with all of these suburban houses and so that communicates social cohesion there whereas we have a lot of contrast with the house on the hill and so that communicates conflict with the house on the hill so reading about gestalt psychology this is very obviously the science behind why affinity and contrast is working so gestalt psychology is all about how we understand things as a whole rather than as parts so how is it that we understand that that tiger is a single tiger behind the bushes rather than seeing that as a whole load of kind of smaller orange colored objects so that is all through the laws of gestalt

there are quite a lot of those laws i'm just going to mention three here so we have the law of similarity the law of continuity and the law of closure so the law of similarity helps us to see all those different patches between the bushes as belonging to the same thing because all of those patches are a similar colour texture and pattern and so on the laws of continuity and closure help us see the edge of the tiger's back as a continuous curve and so with those and the other laws of gestalt we can see that that is one whole object a single tiger behind the bushes and so that is obviously what's going on here with affinity and contrast what the brain is doing with all the different suburban houses because they're so similar is treating them like the different patches of the tiger and it's tying them together and saying they belong to each other and

uh whereas the house on the hill because that's so different it's treating like that like the bushes that was that were in front of the tiger and it's separating them out and treating them as something separate so to sum up the cognition section so associations was all about synesthesia and the connections we make in the brain and that was the science behind why tropes and metaphors work uh spatial metaphors that was about um how the brain has co-opted the infrastructure that was developed in order to understand and navigate the physical environment and it now uses it to understand and navigate the social environment pink shift was the science behind our character and visual hyperbole and gestalt was the science behind affinity and contrast so next we're going to talk about some aspects of the overall structure of our visual storytelling starting with layouts

so there are two aspects that are important here the layout of the form and the layout of the path so the layout of the form is going to affect the player's main mental model of a space and the layout of the path is going to affect their experience over time so some examples of layout of the form so these all come from this book here which is a fantastic book by the way so we have a centralized layout a linear layout radial clustered and grid like so a centralized layout is something like this linear like this radial similar to linear except there are multiple arms clustered looks like this and gridlike is similar to clustered except more ordered now the layout of the path is not completely dictated by the layout of the form for example if we look at something like this a centralized layout we can imagine a number of different path layouts in it

so we could imagine taking a radial path a more grid-like path or a linear path through that space so obviously a linear path through these three different forms so a linear path that goes around a centralized form versus a linear path that goes along a linear form versus a linear path that meanders through a clustered form those linear paths are going to feel very very different because of the different forms and this is because the layout of the form is dictating our mental model of the space whereas the layout of the path is dictating our experience over time so it's the two of these together which creates the overall structure of the experience for the player so there are a few different types of layouts of path so just a few examples here linear circular radial clustered and grid like so it can be hard to make something that

is rich and complex working just from first principles so my advice here would be to look at reference and look at perspectival reference as well as plans and sections so because you get different information from each of those different types of reference also you're not looking here at the dressing and the details and the textures and so on instead you're mentally stripping that away and you're just looking at the spatial design and so what you can do is you can look for inspiration here for the kind of experience you want the player to have and combine that with your direction in terms of the layout of the space and the layout of the sorry the layout of the form and the layout of the player path so next under structure we have intensity so it's very important to vary the intensity over the time because a consistently high level of intensity will get overwhelming for the player and a consistently low level will be boring

so you need to vary your intensity in order to make a rich experience for the player now the final intensity that the player experiences will be a mixture it will come from a mix of the environment art with the gameplay and the narrative so you could imagine a situation like here where we have a very serene environment and it's mixed with incredibly intense gameplay and so the player's experience is going to be very intense and of course we could also imagine the reverse where you get a very intense environment but the gameplay is very calm that is still going to result in a more intense experience than having calm gameplay in a calm environment so in terms of where of where and how we can increase visual intensity so we can do that through affinity and contrast so the more contrast you have in in an environment the higher the level of intensity will be

and that's all from this book here but we can also increase intensity just purely in the aesthetics alone so we can do things like have more intense colors we can have more intense shapes so angular shapes and jagged shapes and things which are unbalanced and top heavy they are going to be more intense than square shapes and vertical shapes and things which are very stable and of course increasing density will increase your intensity as well [Music] so finally under structure i'm going to talk about contrast so as humans we understand things through contrast somebody is short compared to somebody who is taller somebody is young compared to somebody who is older so if we want to communicate that a particular building is very modern if we have that building in a sea of other modern buildings and that meaning is going to get lost nobody will notice however if

we have our modern building in a context of buildings which are much older then the player will notice now it sounds very obvious when i say it but in practice and in the moment this can actually be counter-intuitive often the obvious thing to do always feels like to be consistent however if we're too consistent then we lose uh then we lose any contrast and we lose some of our storytelling for the player this isn't just about contrast over a single visual field this is about contrast over time so there is a concept in environmental psychology called adaptation and that's about how we become adapted to things over time so somebody who lives in a busy city will become adapted to the faster pace of life in that busy city and somebody who lives in the countryside will get adapted to the slower pace of life in the countryside so what that means for us let's say we

were going to do a design like this and we wanted the players to notice how ornamental and intricate and detailed it is however if every other space we've given the player looks like this the player is going to become adapted to this level of ornament and detail and when the player eventually sees this space they're simply not going to notice how ornamental it is however if every other space we've given the player beforehand looks like this then the player will become adapted to this level of ornament and detail or lack there or lack of it and then when the player eventually gets here it's going to seem incredibly intricate and ornamental to the player so to sum up the structure section so layout was about the layout of the form and the layout of the path and the overall player experience comes from a mixture of both and with intensity it's important to vary the intensity over time and with contrast it's important to have contrast

in order to communicate to the player and to sum up the whole talk now so the first section mimesis that was all about mimicking and copying reality semiotics was all about signs and symbols and how we communicate the cognition section was all about neuroscience and psychology and then we ended on some aspects of structure and to remind you again if you would like to follow up in terms of some more books and references uh on this topic i will be putting a bibliography up on my website and i'll putting that i'll be putting that up for when this goes live so anyone looking at this early it might not might not quite be up yet so thank you very much for listening to my talk and i hope you got a lot out of it [Music]