Understanding Game Art – Fidelity and Aesthetics

As a solo developer I have to strike a balance between focusing on art and focusing on mechanics. I want to get the most bang for my buck for every hour I spend learning new tools, techniques, and artistic skills. To do that, I need to understand how things work, even art.

Right off the bat, I want to be clear that there’s no fundamental dichotomy between aesthetics and fidelity. However, with a limited time budget and both of them demanding some amount of my time, there’s decisions to make on how to spend my effort.

If you, like me, are just starting in the art world, you might find yourself sometimes lacking the vocabulary to talk about what you want your art to do. I find there’s a lot of fantastic tutorials out there about improving your graphical fidelity, but I’d like to talk a little bit about how focusing on theory has helped me direct the balance between my programming work, and my graphical work.

First, Some Definitions

When I say fidelity, I’m talking about the precision with which you can take an idea in your head, and put it to paper, vertices, or pixels. When I say I am a newcomer to art, I mean that I don’t have great fidelity. I don’t know how to best get my ideas into reality, and often have to make compromises to my designs because of my skills. Good fidelity means the art is really deliberately crafted, without anything out of place.

When I say aesthetics, I am talking about the underlying intention behind the art. What sort of influences the art draws upon, and how it conveys whatever it is the artist is trying to say. Aesthetics don’t have to be pleasing, they just have to be clearly conveyed. Good aesthetics is knowing where a bit of art is coming from and knowing exactly what it’s about.

Call of Duty: Black Ops came out in 2010 and was a very high fidelity game for the time, with a sort of middle of the road “realistic” aesthetic.

Realistic rain, really detailed gun models, and lots of screen effects were all the rage in 2010.

LIMBO also came out in 2010 and boasted both high fidelity and incredibly memorable aesthetics.

LIMBO brilliantly captures so much feeling with just a little bit of fog and lighting. Well, really, quite a lot of fog.

Thomas Was Alone, which also came out that year, has wonderful aesthetics and a subdued, focused, fidelity.

Clean 2D lighting, gentle particle effects, and smooth camera moments all were carefully crafted to capture Thomas Was Alone’s minimalism.

I was looking for examples of low fidelity games, but the reality is, none of them are very good. Almost every modern game you can think of with “low-fi” (literally meaning low fidelity) graphics are making a deliberate choice to look the way they do. This means their fidelity isn’t low at all. In fact, there’s usually quite a bit of effort involved to get a game to look “low-fi”. Fidelity is just accuracy. You can aim to look “low quality” and still be very accurate in your implementation of that.

DUSK tries very, very, hard to not just look like a 90’s game, but to look like how we all remember 90’s games feeling.

If you really want to see low fidelity games, the best place to look is where hardware limitations prevented the developers from achieving the quality they wanted. Those games were made in the early days of their respective mediums, like the first PS1 or N64 games for 3D, or Atari 2600 games for 2D.

I’d put a Bubsy 3D image here, but you don’t deserve that.

What Fidelity and Aesthetics do

In the big, big picture, art is what glues the mechanical systems of a game to the players eyeballs. It’s the connective tissue between game-space and the player’s head-space, and it’s the primary way we perceive games both literally and figuratively. More so than any other aspect of a game, your art is going to be telling the player what’s going on, what the game is trying to say, how the player should feel, where they should go, ect. Art also plays a disproportionate role in actually selling a game.

For a game’s art to succeed, you obviously need both aesthetics and fidelity, but they affect that act of communication between game and player in different ways.

Fidelity affects games mostly on the low end of things. Can the player read the difference between an enemy and a bush? If not, then that’s a fidelity problem. For the other side of the spectrum, as you might have guessed, fidelity is responsible for hyper-realistic graphics. Fidelity is also responsible for clearly conveying artistic ideas as the artist intended. If the Aesthetic is supposed to be “creepy” but the art just isn’t conveying that, I’d also call that a fidelity problem. The art has failed to accurately capture the intent.

I know Call Of Duty is trying to tell me “You’re Injured and this is Totally Serious”, but all I can think of is if I’m out of strawberry jam.

Aesthetic affects games through the higher concept things. Will my players get the emotions I want to convey? Will my players think my style is “good” or “cool” or “interesting”? Will my game’s art stand out from the crowd? These are the sorts of things I worry about when I think about my game’s art. Have you ever played a game that had assets that didn’t quite seem to match? That’s an aesthetics problem. Have you seen an ad for a game that looked “generic”? That’s also a consequence of aesthetic choices.

Aesthetics depend on fidelity. A great aesthetic is nothing without the fidelity to represent it. I said it above and I’ll repeat it again: There’s no dichotomy between the two, just different applications and different uses. Without custom built sprites and models you might not be able to capture the idea you want to convey with your aesthetic. Spending hours toiling over a shader is technical, fidelity-based, graphics work, but the result might be a tool you can use to capture your aesthetic ideas better.



The key thing is that once you understand what each are doing for you game, you get to use aesthetics and fidelity to inform your development decisions.

In Practice

Meeting your Baseline levels

There’s a certain fundamental level of fidelity that’s simply a hard requirement to make a game. If I can’t convey to the player that these pixels kill you and these pixels are background fluff, I can’t make a game with that art. Art limits your game design in many ways, and those tend to be fidelity based. I often just don’t have the skills to create a model or effect that a player can easily read. My options are to either get better at art, or to pick a different object I know I can create. When working with 3D models, this often means choosing a model that’s easier to make. I used boats in my game for a few reasons, but one of them was that boats are easier to make than cars in 3D modelling.



If you have flexibility in your design choices, use them to navigate away from effects that are too high fidelity for you to create.

Watch your Aesthetic Goals

While it can be very hard to develop without the fidelity needed, it’s almost too easy to do the opposite. Imagine a game with fantastic mechanics, good solid fidelity art that conveys those mechanics, and an utterly boring aesthetic. Almost every WWII shooter made between 2000 and 2010 matches that description.

However, let’s not beat that particular dead horse. For many simulation games, including shooters, the goal isn’t to have an aesthetic that stands out from the crowd. It’s to create a world that’s recognizable, easy to immerse yourself in, and that captures whatever material it’s covering. The aesthetics of WWII shooters are all the same because they’re all the aesthetic of the same part of the real world in the same time period.

Set out your Aesthetic goals clearly. It’s perfectly normal for them to be subdued and unobtrusive. A loud and noticeable aesthetic would be an awful choice for a realistic simulation game after all. The important thing is that they’re intentional. Don’t just make assets without a clear idea why you’re making them certain ways, and why you’re using certain colors, shapes, or cultural influences.

For many of my assets, my reasoning for making them the way the were was “I dunno, because it seems cool”. That’s actually fine! At the very least, me saying that means there’s something visually gripping about my art that appeals to me. If you find yourself thinking this about your art, take a second and try to tease out what specific elements, colors, and influences make your art “cool”. Once you know what your preferences are, and what elements embody those preferences you can set concrete development goals to make all of your art that interesting.

Planning Ahead

Both aesthetics and fidelity have deep and pervasive roots in your game systems. Without planning, you can easily run into problems caused by unforeseen future fidelity and aesthetic requirements.

Changing fidelity often means a gamut of technical issues, usually related to materials, textures, shaders, and lighting. Mismatched fidelity is also something that sticks out like a sore thumb to casual observers. You can have a game with low poly art, you can have a game with high poly art, but please don’t mix them unless you mean too. Fidelity almost always deals with the models as they’re made, and not as they’re designed.

Aesthetics influences a lot more of the how and why behind your game design decisions. While fidelity might demand a certain quality of particle effect for your deadly swamp water, aesthetics make you ask “How do I convey to the player walking here will kill them?”. Maybe add some yucky looking browns and purples to the color palette. Maybe commission a new asset of a skull and crossbones sign to place around the level. There’s a million ways to do it, and it all might seem obvious, but these are just planning ahead with aesthetic concerns.

Changing aesthetics can have huge knock on effects. Modifying your lighting model might require some changes to a shader or two. Choosing a different aesthetic might mean redoing a dozen models to better match the new theming. You almost always want to pick some aesthetic principles from the start and stick with them throughout to inform your asset creation. Things like “what cultural influences are we drawing from” or “what weapon types do the enemies use”. Even setting out something as simple as a color palette can save huge headaches down the line, and streamline the decision making processes.

The Fidelity Trap

While making art for my game, I found myself regularly thinking “Gee, if I just had a little more fidelity, I would be able to do so much more!”. This is sort of true, but there’s a lot more to that statement than I realized. I had pretty quickly passed my minimum fidelity requirements for my game. In fact, after maybe only 6 or 7 hours in blender, I had all the skills to make models in the style I’m currently using for my game. But fidelity can almost always be improved. That’s the development trap I fell down.

As it turns out the bleeding edge of high fidelity is really, really, far away from what most people start off with in game development. So much so, you can always find something to tweak. Better materials, higher quality textures, finer lighting, smoother animations, post processing, and more. If you’re not careful, you can strive for higher fidelity without asking what it’s doing for your game.

I made much more concrete progress towards the ideal “look” of my game by taking time to pin down my aesthetics than I did by practicing more and more complicated techniques in blender. I sat down, did a whole bunch of google image searching, and started to pick out images I liked and images I didn’t like. I grouped them together, and make informed decisions about what elements I wanted to put into my models. I can put vertices wherever I want, so the important thing is not how I create things, but what I was creating.

We practice with our Fidelity,

We grow with our Aesthetics

I set rules for myself on my current project to only use assets I myself made. Since I need to make placeholder art (and eventually actual art) anyway, getting practice and getting usable content seems like a two for one. Sometimes, after finishing a model, I’ve learned so much, I immediately want to go back and recreate it, even better.

Game design is an art, but I’m frequently a technical focused guy. It’s all too easy to think of content creation as simply another technical skill. It’s not just a skill, and I hope you can see how the aesthetics of a game have deep and meaningful influences on every aspect of a game’s assets. After all, once I have the fidelity make anything, the question then becomes “What do I make?”.

I’m not sure there’s one good answer to “What do I make?”. By that, I mean, I’m not sure exactly how I improve my aesthetics. Like other creative endeavors, exposure and experience are huge influences. I find myself improving my aesthetics the most when self-evaluating my work or looking critically at the work of others. I gather inspiration from my own experiences, but I regularly will go out looking for new and interesting takes on art. I’ve spent a lot of time looking through Wikipedia pages like List of Architectural Styles. Find new things, mix things together, get messy, make mistakes, and experiment.

As best as I can tell, I get better at fidelity by making things, and I get better at aesthetics by coming up with new things to make. They feed into each other, and coming up with new artistic ideas is the perfect chance to practice your technical skills. The key is ultimately balance. Never discounting the artistic intention behind anything, and never ceasing to practice the creation of assets. Where Fidelity is a skill you practice with your tools, Aesthetics is a skill you tend to and grow.

Hopefully this helps you consider what sort of forces are at play when you design content, and hopefully this sparks some insight into how you, as an artist, can make great things. Thanks for reading.

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