The ever-vigilant team behind one of my games of the year, Left 4 Dead, have just posted another of their wonderfully indepth evaluations. In these posts, they look back at the game they brought out, and explain to those willing to listen about the different design choices they made in order to make the game have a certain quality about it. Their last post on this subject was about the different techniques they used to implement different Filmic Effects into the game, and this new one focuses on how they created a ‘Stylised Darkness’, and allowed them to consider “aesthetics, fiction and gameplay” throughout. Read the extract below, then head on over here to read the full thing.
Left 4 Dead’s setting is a post-apocalyptic wasteland just before nightfall. As mentioned earlier, this meant constraints in terms of the light sources we could use without hurting the gameplay, fiction or aesthetics. This forced us to get creative: what lighting would you realistically see in an abandoned city overrun by zombies?
Car headlights are a perfect example. They tell a good visual story, implying a sense of abandonment. When you see a car with its headlights on and nobody around, it’s clear something’s gone wrong.
Obviously, such a post will be of great use to those anxiously waiting for the L4D SDK to arrive and hopefully this will steer them in the right direction.