Visual elements: is it possible to be too distracting?

[Squire Grooktook]

Bullet visibility is probably a common topic for devs, but this is actually kind of the opposite. I've recently been testing a rough draft/prototype of a main shot sprite my artist sent me, and when I first implemented it, my eye was immediately drawn to it...but was it drawn too much?

I quickly became used to it and stopped having problems, but the subject invoked paranoia so I thought I'd ask for a second opinion.

Is it possible for something, other then enemy bullets, to be too standout? Can its design, animation, or coloring draw the eye too much? I'm mostly thinking about player bullets and such at the moment, but I guess the same could be applied to enemy designs. Obviously, lots of bloom and glare all over the place might be a bit of an issue, but I'm wondering this in terms of flashy sprite designs and animations and such.

Do you actually want to design enemies and aesthetic elements that deliberately do not stand out, in order to not distract from bullet dodging? Is there a unique art to balancing the visual/eye catching elements for gameplay purposes (aside from the usual like making sure backgrounds, bullets, and enemies stand out from eachother, etc.)? Or am I being completely paranoid and anything goes so long as the bullets themselves stand out and aren't obscured in any way?

Weird question, I guess, and maybe a dumb one. But I never gave it much thought until now, and I'm new. Thought it couldn't hurt to ask.

[S20-TBL]

The key is differentiation and layering.

It's one thing for certain visual elements to stand out. But it's another thing for the player to be able to differentiate between hazards and non-hazards. What is needed to make an enemy sprite stand out from the background, or a powerup stand out from an enemy fireball? Colors, shape, etc. all play their respective roles to differentiate these elements.

For one, I'd hate to make enemy sprites not stand out from the background. So what I do is desaturate the background to a degree to make enemies stand out more. Likewise, I want my enemy bullets to stand out from the enemies themselves, so I make them a lot brighter and more colorful than the enemies are.

I also had testers complain that they were trying to dodge point items that spawned from enemy kills, thinking they were hazards. One artist with more experience in the field than I did suggested to change the design of the point items, so I turned them into crystals. It's easier for people to identify with certain shapes like hearts, crystals, stars, etc. as non-threatening.

Last but not the least, layering your graphics is an important factor: from what I understand, Cave and Psikyo always had enemy bullets drawn with a higher priority than player shots, for instance. While your shots may be flashy, the fact that enemy bullets are drawn right on top of everything else makes them much, much easier to spot.

[mamboFoxtrot]

And in a lot of later CAVE games, enemy bullets have a distinctive glow, as well.


While animation shouldn't be much of an issue, color choice is definitely important. S20-TBL brought up saturation, but the hue and the contrast between the colors within the individual sprite are also important (and also transparency, if you intend to make use of that). The bullet you're showing here has a pretty low contrast between all it's blues, and none of them are really within the neon range of saturation, and also has no outline, so it should be fine. Unless you decide to make the player shot like, 20 of these things fanning out across half the screen in different sizes and patterns like Mihee from Castle of Shikigami 3. Christ that girl's shot pattern was ridiculous - especially when you grazed something and it turned bright red.

[Squire Grooktook]

The key is differentiation and layering.

It's one thing for certain visual elements to stand out. But it's another thing for the player to be able to differentiate between hazards and non-hazards. What is needed to make an enemy sprite stand out from the background, or a powerup stand out from an enemy fireball? Colors, shape, etc. all play their respective roles to differentiate these elements.

For one, I'd hate to make enemy sprites not stand out from the background. So what I do is desaturate the background to a degree to make enemies stand out more. Likewise, I want my enemy bullets to stand out from the enemies themselves, so I make them a lot brighter and more colorful than the enemies are.

I also had testers complain that they were trying to dodge point items that spawned from enemy kills, thinking they were hazards. One artist with more experience in the field than I did suggested to change the design of the point items, so I turned them into crystals. It's easier for people to identify with certain shapes like hearts, crystals, stars, etc. as non-threatening.

Last but not the least, layering your graphics is an important factor: from what I understand, Cave and Psikyo always had enemy bullets drawn with a higher priority than player shots, for instance. While your shots may be flashy, the fact that enemy bullets are drawn right on top of everything else makes them much, much easier to spot.

Yeah, we got most of this down already. Layering in particular is already taken care of.

I know standing out from backgrounds and such is for the best. I'm more thinking of, is it possible that something can stand out too much? Too the point of being distracting? Or is any element standing out an inherently good thing?

[eebrozgi]

A bit different "yes" answer example comes to my mind with the question about standing out too much. Not a shmup, it's from BlazBlue Continuum Shift but here:

Spoiler

Those green-red-gradient burst icons below character names were always the weirdest stain to me in the HUD. They're made to stand out by basically being ugly and just very inconsistent with the rest of the HUD design.

So with objects that need to stand out, I don't think you have to worry much about them standing out too much by their flashiness, it's all relative within your own game. As long as you make sure they look good.

[Squire Grooktook]

Thanks, I feel a bit more confident now that we can focus on making things look cool without worrying too much about making them look too cool .

[S20-TBL]

I know standing out from backgrounds and such is for the best. I'm more thinking of, is it possible that something can stand out too much? Too the point of being distracting? Or is any element standing out an inherently good thing?

I do believe something can stand out too much to the point of being distracting, but nonetheless I also believe it's really more of a balance between design and the player's own situation awareness. It's just as much a fault of the player that he got himself smoked because he tunneled on something on the screen for too long when he should have been paying attention.

That said, I think eezbrogi makes a good point. Consistency is key. There's really no excuse for an element standing out like a sore thumb to the detriment of everything else.

[moozooh]

is it possible to be too distracting?

Of course, and I've no idea how is this a serious question. You should have asked how not to be too distracting, because the opposite is, frankly, very easy. Just take a look at, say, a Michael Bay movie.

Visual elements in general work a lot better when they're clear (i.e. easy to read) and subtle (i.e. only doing as much as necessary to achieve the desired effect). For the latter part to take place you need to properly unify visuals with both functional and the remaining aesthetic elements. I could give a few pointers.

1. Form should go hand in hand with function: dangerous things should convey the message of danger (have a menacing design, be large, loud, etc.), small fry should look and sound like one. Larger things in general should be louder, and vice versa.

2. Ration the cool stuff. Reserve the best, most flashy and impactful visuals for something that is either limited (like bombs or timed abilities) or must be earned (the final power upgrades, that kind of stuff). This introduces a sense and scope of power progression and provides more satisfaction when the coolest things are actually seen. Things that do generic stuff are better off looking reasonably generic so that they don't overshadow all the cool.

3. Maintain sensibility. Unless you're deliberately going for campy vibes, physical interactions between eg. shots fired and objects they hit should look consistent with common sense: wood chips away or burns when shot at, plastic melts, glass breaks, vehicles explode, stones crumble, living things turn into gory mush, etc. If everything dies the same way, with the same sound, etc., it gets boring regardless of how awesomely designed the death animation/sound effect is.

4. Things should feel tangible when interacted with. To give just a couple very good examples, the DoDonPachi laser meets resistance when it contacts an enemy ship's hull and even gives off small sparks and plasma splash in the point of contact, and in Battle Garegga even the smallest enemies may explode instantly, or after a small delay, or even trail off leaving a plume of smoke and explode offscreen, giving a certain notion of personality to whatever targets the protagonist is shooting at. If devs were already getting it twenty years ago, why ignore these things nowadays.

5. There are different ways to make things look cool. Being large and loud and flashy is but one way to grasp attention. If you take a close look at, say, Treasure's game catalog, you will see an insane amount of visual creativity born from hardware limitations in pretty much all of them (but especially the older ones made in the 90s). Ikaruga, for one, is the extreme opposite of being flashy, but I regard it one of the best- and coolest-designed games of all time—exactly because how good it is at being subtle and doing more with less. Radiant Silvergun, on the other hand, was made on a system that had no alpha blending and was absolute shit at texturing, so they had to dither, pan the camera around, use wireframes and 30 Hz flickering for certain effects, and rely on detailed animation and choreography of models to make up for the lack of fixed detail on the models themselves; the generally lackluster visuals were additionally elevated by epic orchestral soundtrack that also perfectly matched the gameplay pace of each given section.

Edit: grammar.

[Squire Grooktook]

2. Ration the cool stuff. Reserve the best, most flashy and impactful visuals for something that is either limited (like bombs or timed abilities) or must be earned (the final power upgrades, that kind of stuff). This introduces a sense and scope of power progression and provides more satisfaction when the coolest things are actually seen. Things that do generic stuff are better off looking reasonably generic so that they don't overshadow all the cool.

Worth noting, but my game doesn't have power up levels for the main/primary attacks. It's sort of inspired by something said by Toaplan about Dogyuun's development,where the players 3 shots all have only one power level and are designed to be detailed and impressive from the start.

(Also there wasn't any meaningful reason for recoveries or powering up to exist in my game, from a design perspective)

That being said, I do have a YGW style bomb system, with the fully charged bomb is meant to be incredibly over the top, compared to the other weapons.