#but also the absolute variety for this fnaf character is incredible

[victarin]

head in my hands dca artists you are all so incredible and make such beautiful art im going to explode . So Much Love for all the different interpretations of the dca so much love for the simplistic styles and the complex ones and the flat faces and the more fleshed out faces and the incredible rendering and the sketches and the comics and the cute dcas and the scary ones and the (non-judgmental but still very aware gaze) ones and ALL the different outfits and . Just know if u are a dca artist i love your art so much

[fearthepandas]

here’s the draft of my video game essay if anyone wants to read it (or help edit)

kay two notes, this is a script for a video, so places where there are weird notes are because those are for the video part and also I'm trying to cut maybe a minute out of it, so if you want to help edit it, do it ruthlessly

Costuming is important to games. There are some who knock it out. You often end up seeing those looks over and over again at conventions, during Halloween, even with enthusiastic kids with chill parents. Those looks don’t happen by accident. Of course they don't. They are carefully crafted by people trained to do so: a costume designer. They aren’t often considered as a typical and integral part of the game development process as other positions. But their efforts enhance the game world while also going largely unnoticed.

Take this example. I'll make a guess: you aren't assuming that that guy in your class with the boat shoes and “Vineyard Vines” shirt is trying to say something in the way he dresses. But, intentional or not, he is. At the very least, he’s telling you what social groups he belongs to. But he could be telling you what he values, what his socioeconomic status is, what his gender his, what the weather is like, and more. All this happens through what he wears. Clothing and textiles have huge capacities to convey information. And they belong to a language that a lot of us can understand. You know, since most of us exist in a world where the majority of people around us are wearing clothing. And luckily for creators, this language isn’t limited to the real world.

In a book, the author has to describe what a character is wearing in enough detail for the reader to understand the situation, and that can take quite a bit of time, or paragraphs, to do. The color and texture and shape of someone’s clothes can be hard to describe when a lot of people don’t know the words used to describe fabrics. In a more visual medium, that message may take equally as long to create. But the audience receives that message in a fraction of the time. We don’t have to know the words. We only have to be able to understand what we see. A flowy dress is a flowy dress. Dirty clothes look like dirty clothes. Belts are belts. Even if we don’t quite know what they’re doing…. (Kingdom Hearts) This is a huge storytelling advantage for costume design.

When video games were first appeared in the 1970s, game hardware was more like our modern calculators than our TVs and consoles. Technology improved over the next decade, but there were still massive limitations in what developers could actually achieve. And this forced them to get creative in addressing a key question. How do you make a recognizable character in as few pixels as possible?

For Mario, who first showed up in Donkey Kong in 1981, the designers made particular decisions which lead to him looking the way he does today. He wore a hat so that animators didn’t have to try to animate his hair and a mustache so that they didn’t have to animate a mouth. And those iconic overalls exist to help the player know where his torso ended and his arms began. These were practical choices. And they have completely shaped the most iconic character and franchise of video game history.

This is a novelty born out of necessity, though. This isn’t how most characters are designed. Characters don’t end up looking how they do by accident. And that’s when costume designers become so important. Costume designers put an incredible amount of thought and time into designing a character’s look.

“When you’re designing anything that’s based in a particular locale or time period (even if you’re not, really), research lends an invaluable legitimacy and depth to your design; the real world is generally way more interesting than what we can come up with on a blank sheet of paper… It’s impossible to recreate the variety and cultural context of a time period out of whole cloth, so you might as well lean on the resources history has been so generous as to provide for us.” Claire Hummel

Characters have to be unique, identifiable, well-suited for the genre and setting they’re in. And if they’re not, there has to be reasons that will tell us something that's 180* different about that character.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t spending a lot of time trying to “read” a character’s outfit. We may be actually looking at it for the entire course of the game, but might not consider what it’s supposed to mean. It’s an invisible communication. We get the basic message and never realize there was a message at all. The hours and hours the designers poured into writing the perfect message gets forgotten, shoved into the bottom of the pile. And it shouldn’t.

We tend to think that costumes that look more like our everyday outfits aren’t as planned or as valuable as costumes that are more… ambitious. When costuming falls into this category, it is essentially invisible to us. This phenomenon isn’t limited to video games either. Every winner for the costume design Oscar over the past few decades has gone to either a fantasy or period based flick. But there is no less thought put into designing Franklin’s (GTA) look than there went into making Siegmeyer’s (Dark Souls).

Games wouldn’t exist like they do if designers weren’t putting the effort and consideration that they do. And games are better for it! “The movement and texture of clothing really adds to the realism of the game. Often I look at games and everything seems so flat.” Lyn Paolo

Designers do research, and sketching, and tests, and review, and then possibly more research, and sketching, and final drafts, all until the developers find a design (or designs) they want to use.

And they have to nail it, or the effectiveness of the whole game can be put at risk. “When the design feels inconsistent with the world, I’m distracted. Fiction bears the burden of being hyper real. To make a story we know isn’t true convincing, it has to avoid plot holes and take place in a consistent world. The moment that façade is shattered, players may have a harder time staying engrossed in the game.” (JennyJackProse) This is a sentiment shared by a lot of players. The anachronism is jarring. So designers have to make sure they put the extra work in to make a design feel appropriate. And, a lot of the time, they don’t even know which game they are designing for when they start their work. Lyn Paolo works on shows like “Scandal” and “Shameless” and also a little known game called GTA V. She created all  her designs for the games based solely on design boards given to her by the developers. She had no title, no series name, absolutely nothing. And she helped build a cohesive, diverse world.

Games have come astronomically far over the past four decades. They look more and more real every year and try to achieve bigger and bigger goals. Designers these days aren’t as limited by technology in how they can make a character look. Costume design for video game characters these days is almost identical to the design done for TV shows, plays, and movies. In fact, there are plenty of costume designers who have worked across these mediums, like Lyn Paolo.

Designers these days aren’t free from limitations, of course. Those restrictions have just taken on a different shape. Designers still have to consider setting, genre and everything else taken into consideration when planning a character’s look. The major issue is that there isn’t enough money to achieve everything they may want to do.

The cost of games continues to skyrocket as the visual fidelity does. And a lot of consumers have decided that they aren’t willing to pay more than the standard $60 price tag established when games were much cheaper to produce. I honestly can’t blame the standard consumer. That's considering that I am a broke college student who might be able to buy only one full-priced game a year. There are competing drives here that are going to limit what designers and developers are going to achieve. Which is going to force creative solutions in new ways.

Think about how many games that have come out in the past few years where you never see another person on screen. (Show Firewatch, Amnesia, Portal, Layers of Fear, FNaF) There’s quite a few isn’t there? Designing a believable human model is hard, and things that are difficult often end up costing more money in the end. So a lot of developers have decided to nix the presence of another person entirely to cut costs. This isn’t great for video game costume designers, but it's understandable from the developer's perspective. And It’s unfortunate that this critical aspect of storytelling is going to be present only in the biggest Triple A games . Which it might considering the standoff over pricing.

A good game obviously doesn’t need great costume design, or even other characters at all, but it can take a game from good to phenomenal. The world becomes lived in, diverse, maybe a little broken. The playable character isn’t some empty shell we inhabit. They’re someone with a personality, drives and faults we may or may not share. They cease to be Mary Stus and Sues and become actual beings.

We should make sure to take a second and really appreciate the work that costume designers do and they’ve contributed to our favorite games. Go on. Hug your local game designer.