Task 11: Elements of game design, part four: Environment

The environment is one of the most important aspects of any game, it has a variety of functions and contributions to the game, and makes it almost impossible to have game without an environment. The environment allows for characters to be placed in a place that compliments the story which a writer is trying to convey, also, the environment helps to establish the surroundings and location within a game. Another way of putting it is that it is vital for a good game to have an environment.
Designers are responsible for creating a believable environment that the characters in a game can navigate, and navigation is important when considering the initial level designs. The environments created have to subtlety and cleverly use colour, lighting and layout of each aspect of the level to guide the player through
the environments. This idea of guiding the player through the levels varies with the genre of game that a particular is being designed for, for example, in a horror survival, the general colour scheme is quite a dark palette, meaning a limited availability of colour use, therefore, lighting can be used to lead the player through.
Directing the player is not only limited to the use of colour from the designers, it can also be achieved through the actual layout of the levels that the game throws at the player, narrow, dark corridors and buildings can be used due to their direct nature when included in game. Buildings give the player options, but, at the same
time, only give them one option, cleverly giving the player a single option to advance.
The way in which the player is lead depends on the genre of game, the genre can influence the whole level design considerably, for example again, a horror genre would call for the levels to be completely different style to an action genre. The style is the key tool in this example, usually incorporating buildings and assets which the player will be forced to go through or move around, again, giving the sense of freedom, however,
not actually having it.
The environment influences the atmosphere of the game massively, the previously mentioned aspects of the level achieve this, colour use, lighting and layout. The layout of a particular level is on of the main roles out of the three, but this doesn't render the others useless, they are all needed to create an atmosphere to suit the
game, the layout of the level creates atmosphere, trying not to exhaust the horror examples too much, within a horror game the idea is to give the player a feeling of panic and to basically scare them. This could be achieved by using lots of tight, lifeless space, where theres no room to run, that gives the player a sense of being trapped and claustrophobic just by initially considering the atmospheric goal. Alternatively, a wide open space in a horror genre gives the sense of safety due to the vastness of the environment, which isn't what the conventional horror genre consists of.
I think that there is a balance to be struck between realism and stylisation in making a world believable to a player because, obviously, if the level is too stylised, then it doesn't represent real life, which is, in most cases, the goal of the production, to give a player the opportunity to live out a life which they can not live outside of the game, and to make this second life believable, there needs to be a representation of the world they actually live in. Although there can be a compromise when the audience of the game is younger an has not yet fully developed a sense of the link between the character interacting with a digital environment, therefore, they are quite happy to be seeing a floating, giant, giraffe shaped house with a tiny bird as the care-taker, so there is room for artistic improvisation and creativity gone wild in this case.
This is a piece of environment art that i like, it was created by Pavel Elagin who is an artist who has worked in Australia on bioshock 2. This piece was inspired by the middle east however i think that it resembles in a way the alien vs predator movie's temple, it is this way that it pays homage to the actual temples in the east,

this representation therefore, in my opinion makes this piece a good environment design.