GR#088 - Plain Dark Tiles

[jams0988]

Why *wouldn't* you black-out tiles? It makes the scene very readable, and looks great, in my opinion. Imagine having a small room in a top-down rpg. It's only like 6x6 tiles, because it's a little storage room or something. The style is steam-punk - pipes and crap all over the walls and ceiling. Do you really think it'd look good to have a huge screen full of repeating pipes everywhere with a tiny room in the middle of it? It'd look incredibly busy, in my opinion. Plus, it wouldn't make much sense...there should be other rooms nearby, right? But you should be able to see through their ceilings, since you can see through the room you're in. But you don't want the player to know where all the rooms are/what they contain without entering them!

Basically, there are a million reasons to black out un-used space, in my opinion, and no real reasons not to. It increases readability, makes the scene look better by reducing busy-ness, and makes sense from a "fog-of-war" point of view. There's a reason almost all games use it, hahah! X3

I do agree it doesn't make sense in *all* cases, like the small platforms you mentioned, Pypebros, but I think black-out usually looks much more appealing then a bunch of repeating tiles. Or even non-repeating tiles. If It's not a playable area, I usually don't want to waste my attention on it!

Edit: Ah, Wes already kind of said what I did, and even provided a great example of black-out done right. And of course it's from Square, which is also the company that made me fall in love with black-out to begin with. XD

[PypeBros]

Thank all for your replies. That will give me matter to think about over the week-end ^_^

If I pick the case of indoor, RPG environment (thanks for mentioning chrono trigger), I can observe that if the scene on the playable ground is e.g. at Lv 1. and that it's seen from an observator at Lv. 3, then detail at Lv. 2 is black'd out as soon as the light is on Lv. 1 ceiling. That fits the "sunken desert" of Chrono Trigger. From the maps of that game I've dug so far, it looks like the artists used black area to circle the playable area, but that they avoid to use it when there's some blocking element in the middle of the area (maybe avoiding large non-playable element in the middle of the playable area would be a mistake in terms of level design )
At other places in the game, we see relatively large, dark, monotonic areas where only irregularities large enough to catch the rare light stands out. Imho, that's well done -- the kind of things I think Ubisoft did with the first Rayman platformer, and indeed, they used it to help tiling of complex objects without sacrificing to the physics of outdoor lightning.

I'm more used to the Zelda series, where non-playable area was light, with low details, but usually not dark unless one wants to suggest a confined place. (as the 6x6 room). That suits labyrinths quite well, imho. I've seen platformers using black "frame" around a small bonus place, and that's fine to me.

I mean for outdoor platformer tiles, which I feel this topic is about.

Yes, essentially, side-view was more my topic. Either outdoor or indoor, with the question "when should we avoid to do it, even though it's clear we don't want repetitive stuff, nor do we want to distract the player's attention too much from the important gameplay element.

Let me try another example, a mock-up of a labyrinth in the Shantae game:
- vs -

Imho "fade to black" is used appropriately at the ceiling of the room, but it doesn't fit with the "higher ground" element on the bottom-left of the picture. Afaik, there's no such thing in the delivered game, where simple and dark bricks are used at the border. Personally, I think this is the perfect situation where a dark silhouetto can be used, in the foreground, that is zoomed enough to be perceived as out of reach of the scene's lightning (just like the head of someone just in front of you at the cinema will appear as a dark silouhetto while watching the movie). That trick is used a lot in DoTT, and imho, it could fit platformers as well.

[Facet]

I think this is an interesting topic PB, and one which I've given some thought about previously myself. I do think you've over-complicated the issue here somewhat, concisely:

Knowing what to leave out of an image or scene is as important an artistic and mechanistic consideration as what to put in.

The issue as I see it is of keeping focus where it's wanted. You've singled out fading to black here so I'll take that as an example; doing so in lieu of homogeneous detail promotes attention to the traversable area in-game in addition to providing welcome value contrast to background work that is often bright & colourful. 

There are other ways of manipulating visual priorities however, a few of which I've illustrated here.


If you want to talk realism (although I don't think this should be a priority necessarily); either photo or visual-perceptual, you can only focus on a relatively small amount of detail from a scene at any one time. The fovea can only distinguish both detail and colour in the very centre of your vision, the rest being extrapolated post-hoc. A similarly adaptive response also tailors the relative levels of detail you perceive in light and shade; you only get a full compliment of range in either one or the other that you happen to be focused on; examples of this phenomenon being contre-jour foreground silhouette and the 'white-out' of an exterior as seen from the window of an interior scene.

Applied in the context of game tiles, the previous would suggest to me that localised detail/interest is both more effective pictorially and also more realistic in an appropriate sense.     

[PypeBros]

Interesting recollection of techniques you present here, Facet. I may be more a "level-of-detail" and "chroma" kind of guy, and that could explain why it always tickled me when contrast/lightning alone was used.



Let's give it a try with a more "platforming" scene. I think, as a "level designer", I'd only use 2 levels of details for a mid-air platform, even if it gets to e.g. 5x5 tiles. I'd keep the lowest level of detail (the equivalent of fading-to-black) for situation where I have a long corridor at 2/3 of the image's height, or when approaching the map border, to really hint the player "there isn't anything else beyond that area".

It could be that one of the issues I have is that a fade-to-black tileset will somehow constraint the way I can use tiles in the level, while I'd rather want them to bend to the situation.

A similarly adaptive response also tailors the relative levels of detail you perceive in light and shade; you only get a full compliment of range in either one or the other that you happen to be focused on; examples of this phenomenon being contre-jour foreground silhouette and the 'white-out' of an exterior as seen from the window of an interior scene.

Yep. I'd consider bonus and boss room to be such places where contre-jour is welcome. A focused place, where ambiance prevails and readability may not be compromised at all.

I do think you've over-complicated the issue here somewhat

That would be very me-ish from me ^^" ... i'll meditate on your concise suggestion when working on my next tileset/mockup/game.

Just one last thing ...

A mock-up by st0ven (iirc), that was posted here some tilmes ago, and which I keep as an evidence that, when used appropriately, that technique can contribute a lot to the atmosphere of a scene. I haven't figured out what was so special about it that make me thumb it up while I'd have disapproved so much lack of information (plain black) in so many other context.

[Facet]

Great, interesting applied examples

Of course you have the freedom to experiment & combine many methods in order to achieve an effect that you like. In addition to the aforementioned you can also use signposting and compositional effects to lead the eye, crudely:

It could be that one of the issues I have is that a fade-to-black tileset will somehow constrain the way I can use tiles in the level, while I'd rather want them to bend to the situation.

Yeah, foreground interest should ideally be positioned for a balance with that of the background; a plain BG encourages a busy FG and vice versa.

That would be very me-ish from me ^^"

I really respect & enjoy attempts to explore possibilities and promote discussion. Please start more technical threads as they occur to you

[Mathias]

Facet - awesome abstraction of the concept of priority, great job.

Pype - I also think the plain dark tiles in St0ven's mock work well. One thing that hits me about why that might be is that the upper mart of the mock kinda mirrors the effect, on top, that the bottom dark tiles have, creating a defined, visually prioritized middle 2/3, while the upper 1/3 and lower 1/3 frame the middle 2/3. Our eyes are drawn exclusively to the middle 2/3 of the composition, which has a very pleasant, easy to gander upon effect.

[Facet]

A bit late, (I thought PB might have more to add) but thanks Mathias I've noticed you champion the cause before and previous commentators had it absolutely right but it's such an important/prevalent issue in pixel/game art that I thought it needed diagramming.

[PypeBros]

I've been pretty busy, lately... And I would like to find and study how the desert tiles were used in the original Turrican on Amiga ... It seems to me like it's a good alternative, using level of detail and darkness, but still keeping a rendering that avoid structures to appear as "hollow" to my eyes ... if only ...

[Facet]

Hey, I didn't mean to prod you into replying I think the quite high visibility Turrican tiles work primarily because the backgrounds are so sparse; flat colours mostly. If those priorities were reversed, ie, the background was fully rendered I'd expect the tiles to be much simpler.

The reason Stoven's forest mockup may appeal more to you could be because it's basically a rim-lit cross-section as oppose to a diminishing gradient of rendered tiles.

[surt]

Flashback makes particullary nice use of blacked-out solids:

It makes perfect sense physically as that's where a solid wall is cut away and there wouldn't be any light coming from inside a solid wall.