rimworld graphics attributes

gistfile1.txt

13:51 rimworld graphics are as important as the typeface on a novel 
      it can be better or worse but in the end I don't care except in 
      terms of how effectively it transmits the story into the player's 
      mind

* not ugly

  if it's painful to look at or it looks awful on video you're not gonna 
  sell that many games because it's just ugly it's actually unpleasant to 
  look at so we try to definitely at least reach the threshold of beauty 
  where you can look at it without psychic suffering
  
* easily identifiable

  the visual characteristics have to be very easy to identify for
  what they represent and this is in conflict with abstraction a little bit.
  
  it makes it easier for new players to play or for people to watch a video 
  our trailer and understand what's going on

* minimal noise

  making the graphics really simple reduces the noise in the image
  and that reduces the cognitive load to read the image
  
  an image with a lot of detail everywhere might be beautiful but
  when you're talking about a game like rimworld with potentially hundreds 
  and hundreds of objects on the screen scanning through that with your eyes 
  and finding what matters to you becomes harder and harder the more details
  are in there

* intensity hierarchy

  this is one way of helping people determine visually what is important 
  and what is not
  
  so it's essentially a hierarchy of what you'd call visual intensity to 
  draw the eye more strongly towards things that are story-relevant and let 
  the eye slide over things that matter less
  
  as a simple example characters and buildings in the game have solid 
  black outlines but plants have dark green outlines or no outlines at all 
  and this means that plants tend to blend into the background slightly
  
  you can still see them it's not difficult but the characters really pop out 
  so if there's a big field of trees and one character on it the character is
  looks like he's in the foreground and the plants are all sort of smeared
  together and it draws your eye there and the same is true of items gold food 
  all have black outlines plants no

* fast implementation

  for rimworld I really just made graphics really really quickly skipping 
  over the need to worry about animation and complex graphics made it possible 
  to inject more story content into the game more mechanics
  
  a lot of this stuff would be almost impossible to do if we tried to do it
  anywhere near the standard that a lot of games go for with their graphics 
  because if the only goal is to enrich the story you cut whatever details you 
  need to to make the story as rich as possible

  it's all about focusing on that one target of being a story generator that 
  works well 

* leave room for interpretation

  I'm going to go into this later but the basic notion is that you don't 
  show everything and that lets the player imagine things better but I have
  a later discussion on that
  
  which is right here
  
  usually one would assume that in order to play or in order to enjoy some 
  aspect of a game the developer has to implement that aspect of the game
  
  but it's not necessarily true
  
  so if you consider this table

                       Perceived by player   Not perceived by player
                       -------------------   -----------------------
  Present in game      Normal                Unperceived complexity
  Not present in game  Apophenia!            Normal

  in the top left and the bottom right are what you would expect
  
  you put something in the game and people enjoy it if people read it
  
  you don't put something in the game and nobody perceives it because it's 
  not there
  
  the top right is a classic design failure wherein a designer might put 
  some complex beautiful number system in but player just reads it as 
  noise because they don't know what's going on or they don't see it
  
  but the bottom left is what I'm really interested in
  
  this is what I mean when I'm talking about impossible game design
  
  something that's not present in the game but the players are perceiving 
  it anyways
  
  think of how powerful this is because you don't even have to do the work 
  but the players are enjoying things that you never had to actually implement
  
  and it works because the human mind is really an overactive system for
  matching patterns this is why you know ancient people they would look at the
  constellations in the sky and they would see beasts or chariots or people 
  or they saw messages from the gods in chicken guts and tea leaves
  
  and people pattern match in a very specific way it's not random people 
  interpret everything that's possible as tribal interpersonal politics
  
  so this is why religious traditions or mythologies would interpret 
  unknowable phenomena in the old days like weather or earthquakes with the
  intentions of unseen deities
  
  it's the weather has an intention it's not just an object
  
  or political discussion tends to revolve around pretending countries
  are people or corporations are people it's like France did this or Germany 
  did that
  
  Germany is a lot of different people and it doesn't have a single intention 
  but we anthropomorphize it that way
  
  and I think it's because the part of our mind that models social interactions 
  is super over developed because it's important to us
  
  but it's so over developed that we thoughtlessly applied to everything
  effortlessly without even realizing we're doing it 
  
  we impart emotions and intentions on things like rocks and rivers and rain 
  and stuffed animals and this happens of course even though these things don't
  have feelings
  
  so we can use this since the goal of rimworld is to create a story of 
  emotions and intentions and people are massively over interpreting
  these things we can let the player's pattern-matching mind automatically and
  unconsciously ascribe emotion and intention in places where it doesn't
  actually exist and that's useful because stories are made of emotions and
  intentions 

  so here are some ways to do it or some things that feed into this
  phenomena which I call apophenia
  
  one is abstracted feedback this is what I mentioned before the player can 
  only invent interpretations if you don't force an interpretation upon them 
  
  this is why the graphics are kept so simple in rimworld
  
  so for example here's the situation the doctor is treating his wife's bullet
  wound but it doesn't show the characters faces or their body language this 
  is deliberate it means that the player is free to imagine these faces in 
  this body language based on the situation
  
  if we put a visual image of that body language in the player would not
  be able to imagine it
  
  so you know if the doctor and the wife like each other the player might 
  imagine a heartfelt moment of tension as he tries to save her and if they
  dislike each other the player might imagine that they have this like get 
  it over with attitude or I'll let you touch me barely
  
  and if one character likes the other but not the reverse there's all sorts 
  of other permutations that you could come up with
  
  the second thing is long-term relevance you want to keep things relevant 
  for a long time to maximize the connections between circumstances and 
  events
  
  interesting story events and interpretation spring from the overlapping 
  of different circumstances
  
  so if you can retain over time the reasons why a character might want to 
  do things something why might they they want to have that intention or why 
  they might feel a certain way you can give people food to generate their 
  own interpretations
  
  so for example this is why in rimworld I specifically designed the 
  random incidents to take a long time to play out wherever possible
  
  so diseases they last a long time so does the toxic Fallot it floats down 
  for months half a year maybe
  
  volcanic winter

  prowling Manhunter packs of wild boars they wait outside the doors for a week
  hoping you'll come out
  
  sieges and so on and so forth
  
  colonists remember events like family deaths or marriages or divorces they 
  know their relationship they know what this person did to them
  
  failed surgeries
  
  they remember these things for a long time so there's many ways for these 
  situations to overlap and connect together and knit into a story of 
  intentions
  
  so for example if the doctor previously failed a surgery on his wife she 
  will have a memory record of that which the game will express
  
  it says botched my surgery and makes her express dislike for him in the game
  systems
  
  but that's pretty thin in terms of how we do it numerically with the game 
  but in terms of how this player can interpret a this it can be quite rich
  in terms of how she might feel about this situation
  
  if the wife needs surgery because of a wound from an animal who's still 
  prowling outside and food is short and the two are divorced recently but
  they had a cathartic fight that they feel better about you could just pile in
  the context and imagine what all these different permutations

references

* https://youtu.be/VdqhHKjepiE?t=843
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia