Beginning by explaining that Rocksteady’s philosophy was “quality over quantity,” from their hiring criteria (the team reached only 65 people by the end of Arkham Asylum’s production) to the detailed content in the final product, Hego discussed the process of working on a pre-existing IP while also trying to create a distinctive style.
“There are a lot of elements that you have to stay true to, and great characters come with great expectations,” he said, and so the team used as many references as possible before beginning art direction to “really understand what Batman is.”
Basing the game in Arkham Asylum offered the team a variety of opportunities within the license— the Asylum’s concentration of Batman’s greatest enemies and the lack of a tie-in to a specific movie or a comic allowed them to use the breadth of the license, and the Asylum’s gothic architecture would allow their artists to work on things that could excite them. In particular, that the Asylum’s dark themes tied to Batman’s famously stealthy abilities allowed them to use light as one of their greatest assets in both visuals and play.
However, to maintain the feeling of a comic book world, Hego stated that they wanted to avoid “desaturating” the world. “It’s very easy to make something moody by desaturating. The trick in Arkham Asylum was to be colourful but still dark and gothic, play with colour and the light and dark. Coloured lighting helps make the game a place, a living character.”
The overall artistic direction of the game was an attempt to offer the “hyper real,” continued Hego, describing it as the use of art and design to exploit the brain’s inability to tell a consistent fantasy from reality, such as fashion magazines, in which every single image has been altered, but we have become accustomed to the images so we believe they are real.
It’s “very important” to ensure that the world you are created makes true architectural sense, said Hego. To ensure that the world made sense but was still consistently interesting, Hego’s team chose to mix styles across the game world, while ensuring space for Batman to sneak and use verticality. The maximum security wing offering an industrial gothic look in comparison to the Victorian medical wing, for example.
“If you go on holiday to a new place, after the first couple of days you stop paying attention to where you are, because you’re just used to it,” claimed Hego. “It’s important to have a lot of contrast in a game environment because in your head you will begin to ‘normalize’ anything you see too much. You could have a really gorgeous, detailed game, but if it stays the same throughout, it will actually have less visual impact than a more varied game that looks less nice.”
“Find the space to have grand elements,” continued Hego, “and maybe the rest can be a bit more boring.”
Of course, such considerations can’t work unless you can guide players to see the grand elements. Hego’s solution in Arkham Asylum was to carefully control the lighting. “If it’s lit, you need to look at it; you can place the game’s pacing in the environment,” he said. “the use of lighting can dictate not just what the player sees, but what they should see.”
Using lighting, art directors can create successful point of focus and artistic framing in games even with free camera control, claimed Hego. “It’s tricky to create compositions the way an artist, photographer or cinematographer could,” he said, “but good use of lighting will draw players to create their own nice images.”
Indeed, by carefully using lighting in this way, the art direction can also help the performance of the game, with less effort and objects needed on areas that aren’t lit, as on average players will be drawn on into the game following the light rather than investigating every dark corner.
“Lighting can force player to move forward,” Hego concluded, “and break monotony."