How designers use light and color to make great games

It’s easy to forget how beautiful the world of Myst looked when Cyan published the game in 1993.  Set on a picturesque and mysterious island, The Stranger wanders the world, completing puzzles and unlocking locations filled with heavy fog or shadows or bright sunlight reflecting off of the rippling water.  

Myst had to visually arrest because, other than completing puzzles, there wasn’t much for players to do other than to take in the scenery. There were no enemies to fight or even characters to talk to. How did Myst become a bestseller? By making the world feel real, says Elouise Oyzon, an expert in game design. 

“While the imagery in Myst is pretty static, and the graphics of the time were pretty limited, the designers made very deliberate choices about light and color,” Oyzon says. “They came up with something pretty gorgeous.” 

Oyzon and Stephen Jacobs teach students how to make video games as professors at Rochester Institute of Technology. They and their colleagues at the School of Interactive Games and Media teach every aspect of game design, including how to program game-play mechanics and how incorporating techniques from film, photography, theater, animation, and the rest of the arts makes games more vibrant.  

Light and color selections are only part of game design, but they are some of the most important tools for making worlds atmospheric and setting a vibe. What would horror-survival games, such as Resident Evil or Dead Space series, be without all of those shadows to conceal monsters or flickering lights to reveal them? How many modern games classics, such as The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and countless others, feature constantly changing light conditions thanks to a full day/night cycle?  

Those artistic touches make games immersive, Oyzon says. 

“Different times of day feel differently,” Oyzon says. “High-light settings feel safe. High contrast settings or those with more effuse light indicate threat. Those are all things designers play with. It all comes back to how the designer wants the player to feel.” 

We asked Oyzon and Stephens to pick a few of their favorite light and color effects in video games. Here’s what they said. 

Horror isn’t the only genre with a color palette. Stephens says each genre in film and gaming comes with a visual lexicon that establishes expectations for the type of story about to unfold. One of his favorite games, Grim Fandango, does exactly that with heavy doses of film noir tropes, starting with the dimly-lit detective office. 

The game also creates humor and whimsy by making its characters cartoonish skeletons, Stephens says. But the noir genre anchors the experience. 

“It’s a game that mashes up the Mayan afterlife and the Day of the Dead and film noir,” Jacobs says. “It riffs on Casa Blanca. Just like horror, noir is genre, and it partially dictates your aesthetics.” 

The game is set in an alternate, dystopian reality in England in the 1960s. It’s a big-brother-is-watching world where the well-heeled take a drug called Joy that gives a feeling of bliss instead of the dread and paranoia resulting from all the creepiness and violence surrounding them. 

The protagonist slips into sadness and the colors on the screen become dark and monochromatic. If you choose to take your Joy, the brighter-than-realistic color palette returns. 

“Of course, Joy will kill you eventually. But the effect is pretty great,” Oyzon says. 

That unnatural color palette reinforces the designer’s efforts to create a surreal and paranoid world, she says. Just as Grim Fandango embraces a Day-of-the-Dead sensibility, We Happy Few runs with a 1960s aesthetic in both the character modeling and the lighting that push the weird, faux happiness of the world. 

“The choice of the retro aesthetic, along with the “twiggifying” of characters, make them all caricatures of humanity,” Oyzon says. “It makes the game feel more surreal.” 

The Borderlands franchise brings the joy of RPG-style looting to an FPS set in a Mad Max movie. The original Borderlands, released in 2009, won critical acclaim for basically looking like a comic book. 

Oyzon says a technique called “cel-shading,” or “toon shading,” gives Borderlands its distinctive aesthetic. Everything in the game, from the characters to trash on the ground to rock formations in the distant in the desert, simultaneously pop to the eye while looking two dimensional. But while the world design is cartoonish, Borderland’s color palette is muted and full of drab browns and reds. That’s deliberate, Oyzon says, and is important for a game that wants to be more Frank Miller than SpongeBob SquarePants. 

“The cel-shading gives Borderlands that comic book feel, but the color pallete is very much in line with the grittier textures and lighting from a graphic novel,” Oyzon says. 

FPS games tend to either chase realistic graphics, such as the Modern Warfare series, or splattery violence, like the Doom games. Where Borderlands uses color to add grit to its world, the team strategy-based FPS Overwatch does the opposite. The game is full of splashy pastels that help identify each character’s special attack — which is critical to strategy — as well as differentiate the game from competitors in the genre. 

Overwatch is brightly lit and cartoony, but in a much lighter, more playful sense than Borderlands, Oyzon says. “Think of Superman rather than Batman in terms of its color palette.” 

Often, a game’s setting limits designers’ lighting and color options, Stephens says. For example, games in the Bioshock series are set in the underwater city of Rapture. While plenty of brightly-lit rooms are scattered through the map, dark greens and blues dominate the game because all of those art deco windows peer
into the watery depths. 

That seems like an obvious choice but getting the world to feel a certain way -- in this case creepy and isolated -- is easier said than done, Stephens says. 

The underwater setting certainly influences the color palette and lighting, but you have to do a good job of it,” he says. “Players have to buy into what you create. If it doesn’t look right, you’ve blown the game.” 

GRIM FANDANGO REMASTERED

• Operating system: Windows Vista or later Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, AMD Athlon™ X2 2.8 GHz, or higher 
• Memory: 4GB RAM 
• Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4650 / NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 / Intel HD 4000 Graphics, or equivalent 
• Sound Card: Windows Compatible Card 
• Additional Notes: GPU that supports OpenGL 3.3 or higher 

BORDERLANDS 2 

• Operating system: Windows XP SP3 or later 
• Processor: 2.4 GHz Dual Core Processor 
• Memory: 2GB (XP)/ 2 GB (Vista) 
• Hard Disk Space: 13GB free 
• Video Memory: 256 MB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8500 /ATI Radeon HD 2600 Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible 
• Other Requirements: Initial installation requires one-time internet connection for Steam authentication; software installations required (included with the game) include Steam Client, DirectX 9, Microsoft .NET 4 Framework, Visual C++ Redistributable 2005, Visual C++. Recommended: Operating system: Windows XP SP3/Vista/Win 7 Processor: 2.3 GHz Quad Core processor Memory: 2GB Hard Disk Space: 20GB free Video Memory: 512MB Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 / ATI Radeon HD 5850 Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Other Requirements: Initial installation requires one-time internet connection for Steam authentication; software installations required (included with the game) include Steam Client, DirectX 9, Microsoft .NET 4 Framework, Visual C++ Redistributable 2005, Visual C++ Redistributable 2008, Visual C++ Redistributable 2010, and AMD CPU Drivers (XP Only/AMD Only)  

WE HAPPY FEW

• Required: Operating system: 64 bit, Windows 7 and later 
• Processor: Triple-core Intel or AMD, 2.0 GHz or faster 
• Memory: 8GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 460 GTX or AMD Radeon 5870 HD series or higher Mobile: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M or higher
• DirectX: Version 11 
• Storage: 6GB available space 
• Recommended: Operating system: 64 bit, Windows 7 and later
• Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster 
• Memory: 8GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 660 GTX or AMD Radeon 7870 HD series or higher Mobile: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M or higher
• DirectX: Version 11 
• Storage: 6GB available space 

OVERWATCH

• Operating system: 64 bit, Windows 7 or later 
• Processor: Intel® Core™ i3 or AMD Phenom™ X3 8650 
• Video: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460, ATI Radeon™ HD 4850, or Intel® HD Graphics 4400 
• Memory: 4GB RAM Storage: 30GB available hard drive space 
• Recommended:  Operating system: 64 bit, Windows 7 or later 
• Processor: Intel® Core™ i5 or AMD Phenom™ II X3 or better 
• Video: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660 or AMD Radeon™ HD 7950 or better 
• Memory: 6GB RAM 
• Storage: 30GB available hard drive space  

BIOSHOCK INFINITE

• Operating system: 32 bit, Windows Vista Service Pack 2 or later 
• Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4 GHz / AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHz 
• Memory: 2GB Video: DirectX10 Compatible ATI Radeon HD 3870 / NVIDIA 8800 GT / Intel HD 3000 Integrated Graphics 
• Video card memory: 512 MB 
• Storage: 20GB free 
• Sound: DirectX compatible 
• Recommended: Operating system: 64 bit Windows 7 Service Pack 
• Processor: Quad Core Processor 
• Memory: 4GB 
• Storage: 30GB free 
• Video: DirectX11 Compatible, AMD Radeon HD 6950 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 
• Video card memory: 1024 MB 
• Sound: DirectX Compatible