Games Are So Pretty It's Ruining My Job | Design Delve 

We're back from GDC! Jetlag hit us in the face but regardless i hope you enjoy this episode from tired Ludo & I. What topic would you like to see us tackle next? LET US KNOW!! If you enjoy the show please consider supporting us all making this weird content over on Patreon: www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup

Isn't the quote "An architect's dream is an engineer's nightmare"?

The very fact that so many games now have some form of "Eagle Hision" or Witcher Senses" as a narrative-based reason to strip all the pretty visuals away to show you what you need to be looking at to play the game proves ypur point perfectly.

The best example of “yellow paint” working really well was the bright red objects in mirrors edge because it really fit the design choices while also being a clear signpost for players saying “hey look! Over here!”

I was listening to a podcast complain about yellow paint. There was something like "why do we need yellow ladders? climbing is what ladders are for". I could see 3 yellow ladders IRL from where I was working at the time!

I hardly play AAA games and, as a result, didn't even notice the "yellow paint" thing until someone pointed it out.

Not only has visual clutter made games less fun to navigate, it has made them less appealing in general. I will always be more drawn in by a clever and unique stylization than a hyper realistic environment.

for an example of something pulling me out of the experience I can think of recently, both FF7 Remake and Rebirth have had these mini mission where you're searching for a person or multiple people. In dialog you are given a description of a specific, unique attribute to help you find them, but also when you get even a slightly close to them there's a waypoint above their heads that will even show up through walls, completely defeating the purpose even having the task of looking for them in the environment

As an Environment Artist i wholeheartedly agree with this video. Different departments are siloed off and departments often communicate their intents poorly due to a variety of reasons as mentioned in the video. My biggest hope is that studios will adopt a setting where departments are mixed together more, having small teams based on sections of the game instead of the job that is being done. Perhaps education sessions with these teams would also help so that artists can learn more about the intent of level designers on a project, and designers learning to use artistic elements and terminology to communicate with artists to further enhance and integrate designs with art.

I find a lot of subtle but clear changes in color like making the rocks a darker or lighter color to climb on worked a lot better back in my day, and it makes sense also that climbable rocks would be more smooth and changed

At the risk of taking away from the overall point of the video, the best part was hearing that others at GDC are abandoning their corporate slave drivers to forge their own paths! You guys at Second Wind are inspiring positive change, who could have thought!

Ludo using Unity as a toilet. Beautiful.

Something I've noticed in games where detailed visuals confuse level design, especially when the designers then slap on the yellow paint or a relevant-object-o-vision filter, is that it makes me actually see the pretty environments LESS. If I'm focused on looking for the next trail marker, or busy reading the data in my scan visor, it makes the rest of the visuals become so much noise, to the point where I can't even remember what environmental details there were in the area I just traversed, just doorway -> chest high wall -> resource node -> climbable ledge. It's kind of sad that the environment artists are shooting themselves in the foot like that, because the environments in so many games I've played are just gorgeous, but if I have to look THROUGH the environment to play the game, I'm not gonna actually SEE it.

I feel the same way about the “yellow paint” issue as I do the “characters spoil the puzzle before you can solve it” issue. I never asked for environments this detailed - Twilight Princess is still the peak for game visuals as far as I’m concerned - but because they are, the gameplay suffers, and the solution to that problem created an even bigger one.

I think visual clutter is one of the reasons we are starting to see a lot of games built around looking retro. There's been a massive boom in boomer shooters and ps1 throwback games which all have much less detail but are much easier to read.

Everytime I see yellow painted over the edge, to grab onto. "Ah, Uncharted, you here too"

I had some moments in open world platforming games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Dying Light were it seemed a bit emersion breaking seeing the same yellow sheets or vines or cables draped over ledges that marked them as climbable. I think at that point it just became part of the game but definitely made the world feel a little more artificial in that there's specific paths marked for progression. Makes me think of a whole team of unseen technicians rushing to prepare these ledges and wall climb sections before the main character gets there. The true unsung heroes of these worlds.

My favourite way of dealing with the visual clatter is making actually intuitive “pointers”. Take for exemple firewatch’s map, it pinpoints your exact location, but you have to figure out which way to go using compass and your own orientation skills, so you can freely admire the landscape.

I'm experiencing this right now in final fantasy 7 rebirth. Every screen and environment is so loaded up with stuff that they have to have super hand holdy ui and an agent that won't shut up about the next thing you need to find and of course the dreaded yellow paint. I would have gladly accepted a more muted design with less environmental assets and cities without 200 NPCs that you can't talk to to find the three you can.

The worst I find is the tendancy to make everything dark. It really makes playing some games incredibly difficult, and I end up turning the brightness up even to max in certain games.

Before it made traversal skills irrelevant, warframe did a good job of avoiding yellow paint in a way that mostly doesnt stand out. Spaces where you are intended to wall run to navigate the level frequently have a little bit of wear that highlights them. Its most visible in the oldest tileset, grineer asteroid, but still shows up in some newer tilesets that still rely on a bit of wallrunning, such as the gas city.

Good graphics fade with the seasons but good design is timeless

I hold the first Mirror's Edge in such high regard on that aspect: when I started the game for the first time, I've been thrown off by the red "runner sense" highlight feature. I immediately turned that stuff off to really immerse myself in the no-UI flow of the game and you know what? It's not even needed! The levels are, aside a couple of exceptions, so clear and well thought out that you don't need explicit UI highlights to play it. There are enough "natural" cues to catch your attention when and where it is needed, so you end up "feeling" the path as you run through it without the "runner sense" crutch. Of course this isn't an argument to remove the highlight, it's a great accessibility/difficulty feature, but I found it interesting how the level design was so on point that it is optional even on a first playthrough.

There have been times where I had to google the way forward because the path forward was obscured by the way the environment was designed. A ladder hidden in the murky darkness, blocked by clutter and having the exact same color pallet at the background. It's less that the game is too pretty, but more that the game is too visually busy. Like an IKEA without the arrows or the grey lane you're supposed to follow.

I guess level design clarity is also why "stark white character in a dark environment" is something I've seen before. The Bog looks great, but I can't help be compare it to Ori and Rain World in my head.

Yellow paint is neither good nor evil to me, it feels like a disgusting wart that's grown on the face on the industry due to other issues. Stemming from mismanagement and time crunch, developers have had to come up with new intelligent ways to guide players through their levels, and instead of getting time to work together on developing intelligently laid out levels with beautiful scenery that doesn't clash with the intended gameplay, level artists have had to resort to working out their own solutions. It is a necessary evil at this moment in time, and I hope we can look back on it as a thing of the past in future titles.

One thing I’ve had to do with a lot of pretty games is to turn up lighting to nearly max. Way too many games are so visually cluttered and dark that I can’t see a damn thing. I don’t like squinting for a door that is in shadows past 3 neon bushes, 8 robots, and a super detailed bad guy I need to run around.

3:00 - Ironically, this is an exit. The entrance that gets you on the other side of that fence is more hidden, and you have to explore the map to get there.

Beauty and realism aren't the same thing. Furthermore, realism doesn't necessitate the absurd clutter we often see in newer (Especially post-apocalyptic) games. Sometimes areas are just clean guys!

The new map in The Finals is incredibly simplistic and I realized... Wow it's so much easier to see and comprehend what's going on! 😮

MORE DESIGN DELVE! MORE! (Please, i enjoy under the hood/back end discussions like these very much.)

Two examples that immediately came to mind during this were Assassin's Creed pre-Origins, and Horizon: Zero Dawn. Because AC I feel, actually managed to navigate it's visual clutter really well. Handholds and ledges were really obvious, but still worked with the world, and so climbing and parkour always felt really smooth and natural, and you got used to hunting for that out-of-place brick, or the crack in the cliff, or the piece of scaffolding. Horizon, however, had bright yellow handholds for EVERYTHING, and so I always felt both patronised and walled-in when climbing.

"We're all human too." Sir, you just said that to a dog...

I might be drunk, but your videos are my favorite of Second Wind. All of which are friggin awesome. But you are so cool.

This extends beyond graphics. Animations do that too. Animations so detailed, and lifelike, that they start to lose meaining in the simple gaming calculus. Thinking about games like Uncharted, where so much is going on there, with so little input during fist fights and traversal, that you cant really imagine whats going to happen you hit a button. I think this is another reason from the laundry list of reasons, why soulsborne games are so successful. Their combat is extremely easy to visualize. Thats why you feel that dread, when you mess up and know that youll be pummeled in 2-3 seconds and can do nothing about it. You can also be relatively confident about the the trajectory of your attacks, because of that.

The ability to tell what's important easily through visual cues is what made me like Team Fortress 2 above games like Call of Duty. TF2 went to great lengths to make sure that you could both easily see your opponents and tell what they capable of at a glance. There's so much stuff in CoD that makes the world feel more real while also making it really hard to tell stuff apart.

For me, yellow paint is less of a problem because at least it's silent. What actually bothers me is when you're in a room and you know what to do but you want to look around for goodies and your character won't shut up about what you're supposed to be doing, like "I think i can move these things to get across that gap." Which is made worse when the game throws up a floating dialogue box saying "look at this thing and do this."

Level information density has also been on my mind lately. I have been introducing my girlfriend to gaming and talking her through some things that she may not 'get' in regards to how games are designed and what they expected her to learn, but a very huge thing has just been her strain to parse information in the environment and have the ability to understand 'what can i interact with or what information is communicated to me that i should take note of'. Stray featured heavily in this video and i bet that's for a good reason. I could very quickly understand with years of gaming behind me that the bird spikes on AC units in the environment were places where i couldn't climb... but of course my girlfriend just couldn't tell the difference between them and the usable ones. There was so much /stuff/ in Stray that it made it hard for her to parse what was a blocked off passage that shouldn't be tried to gotten around, and what actually could have. Same for how most windows are closed but you need to go through some of them which are open and barely lit by a single lamp if that. I then backpaddled and have been showing her stylised cartoony games with little clutter density and she's been finding it easier to not be confused by the environment and the cues. She is still amazed by my ability to read an level and understand "yeah, we need to go through there, to get there, and jump up there and i assume drop down there", when all she often sees are jumbles of unremarkable features. It took me explaining highlighted edges as climb spots for her to understand that's what those mean, as she came in with ZERO experience and knowledge of game design shortcuts currently in use that most players will get and understand.. but.. a few will be utterly left behind or clueless. Also the Bog's challenges in communication reminds me of another in the same vein, Carrion. That game also has to maximally use its levels and sound design to communicate gameplay concepts. PS: Also, with how modern developers are treating DLSS/FSR/XeSS as crutches to not optimise their games, you even end up in the situation where some things which /were/ used as vital clues to explain interaction, like said bird spikes on AC units, can get lost in the upscaling, or when you go to lower lighting, volumetric or shadow quality.

The only time I've seen color used to guide a player to where you want them to go that wasn't super intrusive was Doom 2016 and Eternal's method of using green lights as "green means go".

I'm colorblind, so yea, visual clutter, particularly foliage, really screws things over for me. Far Cry or the like are real trouble. So for me, having the clear "OVER HERE DUDE!" indicators is highly appreciated. really liked horizon forbidden west's "scan" thing that showed it to you in a digital UI overlay that was utterly clear but also only there when you activated it. other games have had "yellow paint" that was more subtle, like worn rock or bird droppings on a ledge, which was actually so effective at blending in with the environment, I didn't notice it was a hint.

Wow the bog sounds like a really cool premise and I am really excited to learn more/play it. As someone who gets distracted very easily I find a lot of visual clutter just gets me frustrated. Don’t get me wrong I love a well built world, but it still needs make sense to get around in. Also I get different teams being in different departments for large companies, but it just makes more sense for the art team and environment team to work together so they can deal with the issues you and Ludo spoke about before they become huge problems.

I have JUST experienced this! On Marvel Midnight Suns, exploring the chapel grounds is a nightmare! There is so much visual clutter I can't see the roads and I am always lost, even after 40 hours of playtime.

Your point about how AAA dev teams are generally in segregated teams based on their purpose and are in effect put in competition with one another in order to keep their jobs is something I hadn't considered before when trying to affirm my pro-indie game biases. Instead of just "indie game devs have more passion" or "they have a vision that isn't meddled with by publishers," knowing how different the work culture generally is between the two types of games serves as a more concrete reason why larger teams so often fail.

Portal 2 came close to it sometimes in those underground caverns, which were so vast and detailed that it was sometimes hard to figure out where you were supposed to go next.

One design I really appreciate is the pawn system in dragons dogma 2. Not only can they provide useful hints for quests and pointing out hidden ladders or treasure chests, but they can also act as a guide to the location you want to go to, which keeps your eyes off the mini map so you can appreciate surroundings.

Holy cow your game is beautiful! I can't wait to play it

I just realized the importance of the dog's name. Took me way too long.

Personally, I do a lot of the detailing on the environments in the game I’m working on as a level designer. I use a lot of modular pieces. I can arrange the placeholder pieces so that the visuals work with sight lines, framing, leading lines, etc… then the artists come in to swap out all the placeholders with the final game art. Our game also uses a fixed camera which helps guide the player and give them information without needing for constant UI or yellow fabric. And because there is only one view point, environments can be composed with more intention, making sure things don’t get in the way or block your view. 2D games also have a similar advantage with the camera perspective. Although, our game is going for a more stylized look, so that definitely helps to keep things cleaner.

I feel like there's something to be said for a game that's so realistic it counterintuitively ruins verisimilitude. A core aspect of immersion is forgetting that you're playing a game, and you can't do that if your gameplay amounts to roleplaying a hopelessly lost man who treats the world like a giant museum whose exhibits are all hidden around whichever corner he's not fully explored yet. Having less visual detail (while still having a "realistic style") can result in more "as if you were there in real life" type gameplay, because the player isn't consistantly looking around trying to take all the small details in. And more immersed play results in a less critical look at the graphics.

I cannot get enough of these, if I had stuff like this when I was younger I might have considered studying it!

Thanks for the excellent video. I can't remember the game but I remember that I would end up focusing on the minimap to get around instead of looking at the actual game because the environment was so cluttered.

As someone with absolutely horrible depth perception when playing video games, I really struggle sometimes reading what is essentially a 2D image of a 3D space. Good level design is so important for me. I can't tell you how many games I've rage quit because the opening levels aren't designed in a way that teaches me how to read them. And how grateful I can feel for a simple indicator of "Oi, over here, you can climb this wall!"

Yellow Paint is nowhere near as annoying as "NPC telling you how to solve a puzzle cause you fumbled with it several times" (looking at YOU GoW Ragnarok) or "NPC telling you to hurry up in the background while your trying to take in the world around you" (looking at YOU Dead Space Remake)

Doom Eternal's climbable walls are so hard to spot in all the clutter. Some of it is the environmental artist's fault as they sometimes swap texture and blend too well into the environment. I have sometimes got stuck and had to look up online to figure out where to go next, only to realise there is a climbable wall in plain sight.

As always, tightly integrated teams prdouce the best work, whether it be game design, car design, or building design.

I'm going to put a thought out here, which has to do with the whys of yellow paint or (may God have mercy on someone's soul) Navi-type characters who insist on talking at you about something that was explained three seconds ago or is obvious if you have the intellect of something more complex than a fungus. And that thought is explained by something I saw at an airport years ago. My story goes that I was there to take a plane home, and on my boarding pass, and I assume everyone else's, it said that you should have the boarding pass and your ID ready when you went to board the plane. There was an airport-wide announcement over the PA periodically telling people to have ID and pass ready when you went to board the plane. At the gate there was a sign with four-inch-tall black letters on a white background saying you should have the ID and pass ready. When we got called to board the plane, the lady at the desk got on a microphone and said we should have our IDs and passes ready to board. We lined up and she asked the first person in line for his ID and pass. "Oh," he said, "I need my boarding pass and ID?" He got it out and was sent on. The second person was asked for his ID and pass. "Oh," he said, "I need my boarding pass and ID?". He then got it out and was sent on. The third person was asked for her pass and ID. "Oh," she said, "I need my boarding pass and ID?" I gave up on any belief in the value of human intellect at that point. Now apply that to game design. Someone made a game, explained a mechanic or demonstrated where to go in a way they thought would work and the feedback they got was that no one could find it. So they made it more obvious. They got the feedback from a bunch of people that they still couldn't find it. They made it explicit, and people literally ignored all their explicit signs and blitzed past the explanation because reading is hard and then still didn't know. So they covered it in yellow paint and added in a Navi to stop the game dead and shout 'Hey!' at them, because at least people would stop complaining that no one told them what to do. Then they went home and screamed into a pillow for ten minutes.

Lol - I did not expect that diagnosis from Ludo 🤣

Short and sweet, and I like the tying it to a project you are literally contributing to in a relevant manner.

A couple of comments from me: 1) Obviously, well done. Also congrats on having a good team to work with. 2) I've played several games, where the path or objective was so hard to find, cause you just couldn't see a bloody thing through the clutter 3) I've played games, which were almost railroading through level design, making the art design just fade out like it wasn't even there 4) Both are bad. 5) BUT... I have played some games, where the overclutter IS part of the level design. Legends of Kyrandia point'n'click adventure series. Part of the fun was finding what you wanted hidden in the art on screen AND not getting fooled by false things placed among them. Absolutely brilliant. And the interactable objects weren't highlighted in any special way from the background as was the case in some p'n'c games.

Games that have incredible, realistic, and cluttered visuals also attract gamers looking to explore organically. Games have to satisfy those players either by making being lost fun, or by creating the illusion that the players are forging their own path. People say they hate yellow paint because it's "lazy" or "breaks immersion", but I suspect the reason is they want to feel lost and have fun doing it. That's insanely difficult for sure, but yellow paint as a solution to that is like telling someone with bed sores to try taking a nap. Yellow paint directly prevents them from being lost and is not fun outside of sending players to the fun. It makes beautiful levels feel like just a bridge between fun sections. Not every player wants to get lost in worlds and many want to complete quests and progress story beats quickly. AAA games are finding it increasingly difficult to make games that cater to everybody and yellow paint is just the cleanest example of this.

I'm playing Scorn right now and I'm constantly having to Google to find which meaty knob in the wall I missed that was crucial to progression.

What I truly dislike about the yellow paint is that it seems so obvious, an obvious "We don't trust you to look here, so we made it obvious", which always feels so disheartening to see because its basically the game telling me, the player, that it has no trust in me finding the right path to take. Obviously, not everyone will get it, but I think good leveldesign can naturally guide the players flow and gameplay to choosing the most logical path forward without having to point it out. Same with the barrels in Resident Evil 4. Even without a glow to the containers like in the original, simply establishing a set model for containers and keeping that one consistent would have been enough. Everything is clutter, but a round barrel is container? Got it, look for barell of the same size every time. Or simply having the buttonprompt to interact with it appear when you get close would have been just enough.

I think yellow point has a purpose, but it's limited to tutorials where the player is expected to learn the indication of climbing, vaulting, or crawling. But the. Take them away afterwards.

I'm reminded of when Yahtzee covered that one future-y magenta game a month or two ago and talked about how things can be overdesigned to the point of meaninglessness. Sometimes more budget to give "more detail" to the assets isn't a good idea.

I don't understand why people have a problem with Yellow paint, it falls into the same category as red barrels being explosive, yes its not like in real life but its just visual shorthand

My brother is very good at playing games and we both struggled to complete the tutorial in Avatar because we couldn't identify what we should be interacting with in the overforested open world. So there's definitely a sense that the visual design is getting in the way. Additionally, I want to know if anyone is with me on this, but I feel less motivation to explore things when I feel like it isn't being deliberately placed by a level designer. Even though the worlds are beautiful, I feel like I don't want to explore them because the generative nature of them feels like exploring them is just busy work. Anyone with me on this?

I wonder if this is part of the reason that we're seeing a growing amount of new games that use "retro" art styles. PS1 style games using low poly counts but with high quality textures and other newer visual abilities. Kinda a mix of both worlds, were things can still my highly textured and look pretty on our modern screens, but have the simple and less clutured look of older art styles

This isn't quite the same thing, but it's easy to lose track of your character in Smash Bros. Partly it's the moving camera, but it's also because of visual noise. I'm sure the designers do take great care in this, but part of me wishes Nintendo erred more on making player characters stand out from the background.

I like how in the Metro games, if you ever feel lost you can look almost anywhere and find some broken street sign literally pointing the direction you are meant to move. Confusion doesn't happen often (with levels usually being mostly linear anyways), and they blend in enough, that they don't take you out of the experience much.

I think it was in a Valve game (probably HL2 or Portal), they mentioned how they used lighting to draw the players attention and help them navigate. So, either this has become less possible because of all the stuff/tech the devs are trying to find space for, the publisher is trying to make the game more appealing to "everyone", or they're having to accommodate for gamers like DSP >_>

The worst example I keep seeing lately is where there's so many lights or glowing objects in an environment and the game has a few interactable buttons but you don't know what the button or switch is because of all the background stuff drawing your attention. So they add a UI prompt when you're looking at the button with a "press x" appearing which makes me ignore the environment and just move my character around randomly till the UI prompt appears. Compared with that some yellow paint to give me a clear visual indication of where my character can climb within the environment itself is quite welcome (and better than the overused variations of batmans detective vision to reduce the game world to glowing gameplay elements)

When I think about this topic the very first game that springs to mind is Borderlands 3. When it released I bought a copy to play with my partner. We installed the game, sat down on the lounge to play splitscreen, made our way through the opening area . . . and found we couldn't tell the enemies we were meant to be shooting apart from the environment around them. We made it through the early levels, but only by using their health bars to aim. Though the game had a splitscreen mode, it was impossible to play because the enemies and environment were too detailed and shared too much of the same colour palette. We dropped the game after one session and never came back to it.

Whenever I see the yellow painted portions on a natural-looking climbable wall in the wilderness for example, my first thought is "If you're going to tell me someone has gone up this cliff and painted all these specific rocks just so you could know where to move, why didn't they just attach a fucking rope ladder here at the top? Who the fuck carries paint on their back just so they can mark some rocks!?" Sometimes this can be made to look visually pleasing, but it's normally hard to justify. Usually if there is some cliff you need to traverse to get from point A to point B, regular people would find a way to make it easier to traverse - a bridge, some very specific chiseled spots to make it easier to climb. And if this is meant to be a "secret" way to point B, why would you mark it with paint? You're making it easy for anybody with an inquisitive mind to stumble into a place you wanted to keep hidden. I get it, realistic visual styles make it hard to have people notice the intended path forward, it's a struggle. But in making the designer's intentions visible, it usually results in decreased immersion.

The whole "yellow paint" thing never bothered me, probably because I have encountered incidents where environmental clutter made finding an objective or location pretty tricky. Although, some games I've played have gotten around this by giving the character some device or equipment that helps, like a compass or map or, in the case of Shadows of the Colossus, something magical to point out where to go. It also helps when I like to wander around in games. Like, if I'm told a certain city is my next objective, I can say, "Great! I'll avoid that spot so I can enjoy the rest of the world before moving on with the story."

I wouldn't say this is a new problem. I remember when Gears of War (2006) come out and them talking about building the entire level/game in Maya then importing to Unreal, which was a shift from building in engine with an editor and using BSP (Binary Space Partitions) to box the level out, then texture the walls and place static models in the environment. Games were becoming more art focused and less level design focused even at that point in the 360/PS3 era. I remember having talks with other level designers at the time about we are less and less of a focus. Design has always been tricky like that. Good design can be almost invisible, but good developers will always know just how damn important it is.

I have noticed a lot more yellow paint these days. Granted, I don't play a ton of AAA, but the ones I do, sometimes it is literal yellow paint, sometimes it is a giant tarp draped over a stack of boxes that don't make diegetic sense when you think about why they would be there. I am far more drawn to games with unique stylistic looks, or games that don't mind you getting a little lost. Elden Ring does some great navigation work with just a well placed torch here or there, or maybe a glowing flower that could just as well scream "ambush" as "the way you should go".

I encounter this kind of problem when I played HZD: Forbidden West. The environments were so lush and realistic that, without the Focus highlights, I would not be able to fine the interact points in the areas.

Honestly I don't give a fuck about modern games, I can't even remember the last AAA title that blew me away. Indies, old games and AA sometimes for me. Oh yes, I hate when I the sun gets in my eyes while playing a game, if I wanted that I can always go out of my house !

Ludo's not a doctor. She's a dog-tor.

you all are inspiring the industry that inspires you. That is a legacy ANYONE should be extremely proud of.

I love those deep dives so much Your content is amazing guy Second-wind indeed

This reminds me of a video that criticized the last Thief game to come out because the game was too linear and it needed a UI to help you navigate, but trying to explore it without the UI just made you lost. It's easy to forget that sometimes developers feel compelled to add things to make levels easier to navigate because obviously they want the player to win, but it backfires and makes the actual traversal of the level less engaging.

"We're all human here." - JM8, talking to a dog

The concept art for the bog remind of rain world in all the best ways (besides just the main character) I adore ui minimalist atmospheric games like it and hollow knight and I hope to hear when and where I can wishlist and follow the game!

I’d also say that this amount of “visual clutter” actively makes some games more difficult to run if you don’t have a strong enough GPU. Unless I’ve just cleaned my laptop’s insides, it struggles to run games like Helldivers 2 at 60 fps (or sometimes even 30), and I largely suspect that it’s due to the sheer amount of particle effects. Oh, and even when in top shape, I still have to use minimal graphics settings. This isn’t the only game where I have this issue, but it is the most recent.

You're totally right that when there's too many assets in view players can end up feeling lost, but on the other side of the coin, clutter can also be used extremely effectively to hide and obfuscate secrets and items in games such as Elden ring or even the recent Dragons Dogma 2. It's so easy to miss an item, cave or tomb entrance due to visual clutter and it becomes - atleast to some extent - more rewarding when you find the more cleverly hidden ones. It's a tough balancing act and it doesn't work in every genre of gaming either. Great topic for discussion though, thanks!

LIGHTING. Good lighting can do yellow paint's job even better.

I always envisioned an entity which takes the form of an old hooded hermit that transcends video games and walks with a buck of yellow paint around slapping it on all of the location needed to get the player where they need to go. I don't know why I think of this but it seemed to have made sense to me in a strange logic of sorts lol.

It’s interesting to watch these videos and apply them to other art forms. (I’m a musician.) It’s really cool to try to find the fundamental problems and apple it to your craft. This video was a cautionary tale for me that you shouldn’t place form over function. And I REALLY need to learn that lesson. I’ve come to love these videos

Let me start by saying I love your videos. They give a behind the scene look at things gamer take for granted. With that out of the way I think with The Bog the way you explain it really sounds like "This triple axle is really hard to do, especially blindfolded with an arm tied behind your back." So yes it's hard but along the way you decided to flex too. Communication as you've said must have been really important for clarity and is more possible in smaller indie studios where office politics doesn't get in the way.

As an aging gamer 🤪 I like the yellow paint effect especially in big open worlds. When you have less time to play it's nice not to have to wander aimlessly if you don't want to.

It boggles my mind that big studios still haven't figured out how to keep design consistent and communicate across large organizations. This is stuff software developers figured out decades ago. This is just more evidence that the industry itself, at least at the AAA scale, is not run very well.

I think one of the best ways to get around the yellow tape issue in a lot of the games we see might be to increase the amount of interactivity available. Take, for example, Disonhoured, and Li'l Gator Game, and contrast against Resident Evil 8. In Disonhonoured, the player can zip around with the blink power, or become invisible, or possess a rat, or even just not use any abilities at all and navigate by normal jumping and climbing. There's very little obvious stuff saying "climb on me" because the game already teaches you that - like in real life - you CAN just climb or grab or do the thing you wanted to do. Li'l Gator Game has a freeclimb mechanic and gliding like Zelda on a cute world with fun characters, and due to its freeclimb mechanics, the player can essentially climb anything they think they can climb, and instinctively know that if you can't yet climb something, you either havs to try something else or get power ups. By comparison, RE8 uses yellow tape to highlight things you can break, or things you would want to interact with, because normally you CAN'T destroy or interact with a lot of things you would be able to in real life. Not all games could be solved this way, and I firmly believe Uncharted did a great job of using "look at me" elements without them being distracting, but I think a good way around yellow paint might just be to allow the player to do more things.

A few years ago, i played Breath of the Wild, Gothic 2 and Witcher 3 pretty much back to back. And what you are saying here perfectly summarizes my experience with these three games. The Gothic games are ooooold, but have a stylized artstyle that's easy to read and still is able to create an immersive atmosphere. I never was confused what i could or couldn't pick up or interact with. And i could easily recognize different areas in the game world. Breath of the Wild is of course far more modern but still has a very stylized artstyle that also makes it easy to read your surroundings and recognize what what you can interact with or pick up. Also, the map design is so insanely good that i can watch over my wife's shoulder while she plays, see a monster camp in a forest and still tell exactly where she is, because every area is *that* uniquely handcrafted. Witcher 3 was incredibly hard to read. I constantly needed the witcher senses to be able to find out where i am supposed to go, what i can and should interact with and what is just decorative clutter. Not to mention that navigating the forests and swamps of Velen without your minimap is hopeless. Witcher 3 is still a phantastic game for other reasons, but the readability of the graphics was abysmal for me.

I fucking love to hear that gdc story!!!!! That 2nd wind inspired at of other creators to go independent and escape the corporate overlords!!!!!!!!!!! Fuck yeah thats so awesome!!!!

I don't know if you played rain world but your and your team's game's protagonist is so similiar to that game. The art style is clearly different tho. You should play rain world because the level design of rain world is so amazing imo.

i go with clutter rules. Dead ends and alternative routes can have more clutter and fewer lights, while the desired path has little touches. Showing its been walked through and more lights

This is a more nuanced position than "yellow paint is industry best practice, complaining gamers are the enemy".

I actually ran into this problem with Mario Kart 8. Everything is so shiny and busy that it actually becomes hard for me to find the road. Every signpost needs extra detail to look extra believable, but it ends up making the shape less distinct. Now that I think about it, road signs IRL look as flat as possible so you can actually read them. On the upside, I think I understand what the word "hyperrealistic" means now.

I like the satisfaction of finding things myself rather than being guided with yellow paint however, you mentioned escort mission. If you can manage make it feel neither utterly pointless or frustratingly difficult, that would be an achievement for the books.