game-visuals
Game Visuals
Visual design principles for games — how art communicates, guides attention, and serves gameplay.
Core Vocabulary
Perception and Legibility
Visual Hierarchy — The ordering of visual importance. The most critical element (player character, key information) must have the highest contrast relative to its surroundings. Secondary elements have medium contrast. Background elements recede. Violating hierarchy — making the background more visually interesting than the player — is the most common legibility failure in indie games.
Value Contrast — The light-to-dark relationship, independent of hue or saturation. Value contrast is the most powerful legibility tool because it works for everyone, including colorblind players. The grayscale test: convert to grayscale — if important elements don't pop, the problem is value, not color.
Saturation Contrast — The interplay between vivid and muted colors. Maximum saturation everywhere produces visual noise. Varied saturation — some vivid, some muted — creates hierarchy and visual interest. The most vibrant-seeming games (Nintendo) achieve this through varied saturation, not uniform maximum.
Density Balance — How much visual information is on screen, and where. Background density should be lower than foreground density so the player's eye naturally finds important elements. High-density backgrounds compete with gameplay; low-density backgrounds recede and support it.