Game Art Styles

Photo Realism

Photo realism is a game art style where a games graphics are designed to look as real and photo like as possible. They are often very sharp and high detail and take a more powerful gaming system to run these types of games, for example a high spec gaming computer, an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. There are many modern games where the graphics are designed in a photo realism style; for example Crysis, Call of Duty Modern Warefare 2 and as pictured the soon to be released Gran Turismo 5.

Cel Shading

Another type of game art style is cel shading. This is where the graphics in games are designed in an almost cartoon like way. They are much lower quality then Photo Realism, every edge is outlined in black and often the graphics appear to be very blocky and chunky. These graphics can be found in various Xbox and Playstation 2 games, for example XIII and Auto Modelista which is pictured below.

Abstraction

Abstraction is another style of game art. Abstraction is a art style which is quite unique a hint comes from the title. Often the graphics in an abstraction style of game are very abstract. Usually abstraction games are quite simple graphically although this isn’t true for all abstraction style games, these style of games can be found on many different types of consoles. An example of this art style would be the Lego games series, or Little Big Planet, for the Playstation 3 as pictured below.

Exaggeration

Another type of game art style is Exaggeration. This is where the graphics in games have been designed in a very exaggerated way for example like Manga art. The graphic quality is lower than Photo Realism style art however the quality generally isn’t bad. This style of game art can be found in a variety of games and consoles for example, the Zelda series, as shown below.