Visual flair, art and colour in level design

A distinctive art style can be key to a game's success. Games such as Mirror's Edge, Team Fortress 2 and BioShock are instantly recognisable through their use of colour, lighting and architecture:

Most of the time when you see a picture of one of the plague of modern war shooters that has befallen us like so many locusts, the only way to identify it is the configuration of the heads up display.

Call of Duty? Bad Company 2? Medal of Honor? Who knows.

To be fair to them, there's not much you can do with the art style of a modern shooter. Realism makes the games more immersive, and a more cartoony art style could be considered disrespectful to the subject matter. This is where games like Fallout 3 succeed: it took the distinctive 50s pop culture art style and added 200 years of nuclear destruction and decay to make the drab, browny-grey visuals we know and love today.

From this...

...to this

Even amongst Source games there are many variations:

Yes I've used this image before, what of it?

Half-Life 2 tends to take a sunny, european city style, and then crush it under hundreds of tonnes of combine metal,

While Portal takes a minimalist approach to draw your attention to important objects, and avoid visual clutter infringing on gameplay.

As you can see, art style and gameplay are inextricably linked: in a realistic shooter, you want the environment to look as realistic as possible, perhaps with some moody skies and lowered saturation to create a forboding atmosphere. In a Tolkien-esque fantasy world you want towering castles and gloomy dungeons.

Try this out next time you make a level: pick an art style and build a level around it. If you're short of  appropriate textures, Interlopers and Half-Wit 2 (both linked at the bottom of the page) have tutorials on texture creation.

Happy mapping!

Pre-war Fallout 3 image courtesy of Lydia