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Density

Today I’ll be writing about the “density” aspect of Skin Deep’s art.

What do I mean by this? In this context, density means: how busy or detailed something is, and the game’s approach toward the concept of detail.

Example: Low density

I’d describe the art in Caravan Sandwitch as “low density”:

• Large swathes of flat colors
• Texture and model complexity intentionally kept minimal
• Lots of “negative space” that gives breathing room to the visual elements.

Caravan Sandwitch (2024)

Example: High density

I’d describe the art in Battlefield V as being “high density”:

• Textures are densely packed with small details
• Visuals are complex, detailed, busy
• Scenes are packed with many elements

Battlefield V (2018)

Which one is superior??

So which one is the ultimate art… which one is the champion in art battle royale?

Surprise! Trick question!

Like a lot of game development, there’s no single right answer for how to do the thing. The approach is dependent on a zillion things to consider:

• what style fits the game you’re trying to make
• what style fits the budget and time you have
• what amount of time/resources does your style require to make art assets
• how many people on your team have the ability to adopt and make assets in the style
• what tools does the style require, how expensive are these tools, how many people on the team have access and experience in these tools
• does the style use existing best practices and production pipeline, or does it require you to build all-new scaffolding
• what style displays well in the game engine’s renderer. How much bandwidth do you have to make the renderer fit this style
• what new thing is the team interested in learning
• and so on, etcetera etcetera…

So yea, lots of practicalities and nuts & bolts to sift through. Like a lot of creative and tech decisions, it’s a mixing bowl of technical considerations + production considerations + intuition + whatever you got going in on your life.

Skin Deep art

For Skin Deep, we aimed for “low density” art:

• Partly for production reasons. This would be more sustainable and achievable for our team size + resources.
• Partly for gameplay reasons. For making an environment that was less-busy and more instantly understandable.
• Partly to use an existing art style (from Quadrilateral Cowboy & Thirty Flights of Loving). We could use this as an initial springboard/direction and expand upon.

Skin Deep (2025)

80-20 rule

The general guideline was to have something mostly be flat/undetailed, but include tight pockets of detail.

Hence: 80% of an asset should be “flat”, and 20% should use high-density detail:
In these examples, the edges of the material have pockets of intricate details, of paint chipping, of light fixtures on the perimeter, of dashed red lines. The majority of the material, however, is intentionally kept flat and sparse.

As you can guess, “80” and “20” aren’t real numbers meant to be measured. It’s intended to express a vibe: high-density details should be used very sparingly.

Contrast amount

Related to this is the amount of contrast on an asset.

We wanted ‘space wallpaper’ for some spaceships. This was one of the earlier iterations of it:

The wallpaper pattern is gorgeous. However, we found it was pulling a lot of attention to itself. It’s relatively high-contrast, and is relatively intricate, resulting in it drawing the player’s eye.

The question here was: did we want a standard wall to pull this much player attention?

Nope – it’s a great-looking material, but didn’t work for gameplay. There is a “budget” for player attention, and it didn’t make sense to spend it on a standard wall.

So, we iterated and made a version that had the same vibe but was intentionally less attention-grabbing:

This can be eyeballed, but when in doubt, you can do a (very) rough “busyness” test by making the image greyscale and then applying a blur to it. Compare the 2 versions:
is busy vs. is not busy

Et al

If you play through Skin Deep, you’ll 100% absolutely find things that don’t abide by these guidelines.

Yup! Sometimes it makes sense to bend the rules, sometimes you just kinda run out of time, sometimes it’s fun to just do whatever. I personally think it’s fine to be less rigid. We’re not robots, and there’s something nice about visible brush strokes.

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