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CREATIVITY
The Illustrative World of Indie Games
Upon exploring the mysterious island in The Witness, players will discover the remains of an abandoned civilization. The not-quite realistic illustration style lends an air of impressionism to the game.
Rachel Cassandra
In addition to racing cars and shooting enemies, video game players can now enter a Swedish fairy tale, work as a border agent for a fictional dystopian country and become a dog asking rabbits
for clues in an ethereal, foggy world—all thanks to independent gaming. The independent, or indie, gaming industry has trans­ formed the landscape of available adventures; with this diversity comes a similarly diverse array of illustration styles and techniques.
In indie games’ early years—1990 to the early 2000s—3­D artist Luis Antonio of the adventure game The Witness says people from math and programming backgrounds populated the genre. Indie games have since become more accessible to artists and illustrators who haven’t yet worked with game design tools. “Someone who understands balance, composition and movement is much more important than someone who is really good technically at building things,” says Antonio. “It’s easier to teach [people] how to use software than it is to help them be a good artist.”
Games are labeled indie when individuals, small teams or indie companies create them. Now that the engines for building games have become increasingly accessible and games can be distributed easily online, indie games have flourished. Like indie films, being an indie game doesn’t necessarily predict its size or profit, as demonstrated by such wildly popular games as Minecraft and Flappy Bird. Minecraft brought its creator billions. But on the other end of the spectrum, there are games like Mike Joffe’s Benthic Love, which explores the romantic lives of anglerfish and has a fan base of about 2,400.
That’s the upside to working on indie games: creative control. As Antonio says, developers will censor your work and pressure you
to avoid creatively risky decisions in order to draw as wide an audience as possible. Free from this restraint, indie game makers can delve into more meaningful projects—those that may trade
a wider audience for a more deeply affected one. Many indie games forgo striving for reality, instead embracing stylized illustration and aiming to make unique worlds—something these three games manage to do in spades.
The Witness
“Some people really enjoy doing guns all day,” says Antonio, who helped create Manhunt 2 and other violent games while working for mainstream companies like Rockstar Games and Ubisoft. He far prefers the team structure used in the creation of The Witness, in which “no one has a position, there’s no hierarchy.” He states this showed up even in the way they created the posters and the trailer. “In any other company, we would have outsourced. It’s very empowering. We’re just trying to solve problems.”
In The Witness, players begin in an enclosed castle on a deserted island, where they learn how to play the game by completing tasks. Players have no instructions, and their only means of interaction involves solving mazelike puzzles on placards scattered throughout this new world. The island offers stunning stylized depictions of foliage, crumbling buildings and bodies of water. Although players can venture anywhere in the world, the game artists created pathways through vegetation so players don’t feel overwhelmed by the world’s expansiveness. The art team also selected brighter colors to draw players to the important parts of the game, including puzzles and relevant material.
When Antonio and the art team started on The Witness, they
30 Advertising Annual 2016