Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
characters appear in front of the backgrounds. The artists can paint these back-
grounds from a variety of viewpoints, making such games more visually interesting
than side-scrolling and top-scrolling games, constrained only by the fact that the
same avatar graphics and animations have to look right in all of them. Some use a
2D/3D combination model in which the background is 2D but the character ani-
mations are rendered with a 3D engine in front of the background. (See Figure 19.2
for an example.)
Visual Elements
Whichever interaction model and camera model your game offers, you'll need to
supply information that the player needs to know by using the visual elements dis-
cussed in this section.
Main View
The player's main view of the game world should be the largest element on the
screen. You must decide whether the main view will appear in a window within
the screen with other user interface elements around it, or whether the view will
occupy the whole screen and the other user interface elements will appear on top
of it. We'll look at these options next. (See also “Choosing a Screen Layout,” earlier
in the chapter.)
WINDOWED VIEWS
In a windowed view, the oldest and easiest design choice—the main view—takes up
only part of the screen, with the rest of the screen showing panels displaying feed-
back and control mechanisms. You find this view most frequently in games with
complicated user interfaces such as construction and management simulations,
role-playing games, and strategy games, because they require so many on-screen
controls (see Figure 15.4 for a typical example). Using a windowed view does not
mean that feedback elements
never
obscure the main view, only that they need to
do so less often because most of them are around the edges.
TIP
If you need to
display text in an
overlay, as many role-
playing games do,
use opaque or nearly
opaque overlays so
little of the background
is visible through them.
Figure 15.5 shows why:
The semitransparent
overlay is hard to read
because the image
underneath confuses
the text. Players find it
irritating to read text
with graphics under-
neath it, especially
moving graphics.
The windowed view really does make the player feel as if she's observing the game
world through a window, so it harms immersion somewhat. It looks rather like a
computer desktop user interface, and you see this approach more often in PC games
than in console games. The loss of immersion matters less when the game requires
a great deal of control over a complex internal economy and the player needs access
to all those controls at all times.
OPAQUE OVERLAYS
If you want to create a greater sense of immersion than the windowed view offers,
you can have the main view fill all or almost all of the screen and superimpose
