DECONSTRUCTING #006: How Resogun made the visual mayhem work?

INTRO

I believe it’s very clear to everyone who has played Housemarque’s Resogun, that is has a lot of huge explosions, tons of effects, mobs of enemies, all kinds of particles flying in every direction, humans to rescue and massive amount of bullets, sometimes all of them on the screen at the same time. I also believe, that the same crowd feels, that it is a game that, despite all of this mayhem thrown on our retinas, super-rarely suffers from an un-clear presentation – it is always clear where the projectiles are, where the enemies are and where your ship is. But how was this achieved?

NOTE: I do work at Housemarque, BUT I was not part of the Resogun team. At that time I was 100% bound to Alienation, which was developed at the same time. This little fact made this article quite an interesting, if not a bit intimidating one to write, as I’m actually analyzing my colleagues’ work here, without consulting any of the people involved in the development at the time I was studying the subject. I hope this is as interesting one to read as it was to write and study.

COLOURS

Luvly colours, and so readable.

Let’s start by paying an attention to the main theme in Resogun’s colour grading. It is very well thought out. The background uses more dark, cold, green-blue (sometimes a bit dark violet) hue palette, whereas all the hazards tend to be bright, warm and in many cases the opposite colours (with few exceptions, but even then they’re clearly seeable).

In Resogun all the elements have also their OWN coherent colour space: background, enemies, enemy bullets, player bullets, power-ups/collectables, hazards, you name it. Even when there are tons of stuff on the screen, the player can just go into the zone and be sure, that there is virtually no possibility to mix-up things.

NEGATIVE SPACE

The truly brilliant part of Resogun’s visuals is the middle part of the “cylinder” – it’s pretty much always a true contrasting, dark’ish block of matter, thus creating a negative space around of the immediate surroundings of the player’s ship. This is a huge part why it is so clear to see what happens near your ship all the time, even when the screen is filled with all kinds of stuff. This negative space block also blocks the less and un-important (possible) happenings on the other side of the cylinder, which also contributes to the clearness of the presentation.

SORTING

Them projectiles need to be seen and trust me, they will be.

Like many classic shoot-em-ups before it, Resogun seems to sort the elements it uses with the priority of:

1. HUD elements and hit area (around and on the player ship)
2. Projectiles
3. Enemies/player
4. Rest of the stuff on the gameplay plane
5. Background

This kind of sorting helps a lot in trying to figure out what actually happens on the screen and it’s one of the things where I feel it was truly the right choice to respect the already well tried recipe of the yesteryears.

VIDEOGAMEY VISUALS

Not afraid to be a videogame - it really helps here.

Resogun does use quite a lot of different elements, which one could say are being videogamey, in order to present a more clear presentation.

1. Outlines on enemies and the player ship
2. Hit area in the player ship
3. HUD around the player ship
4. Enemies and the player ship seem to be lit separately, not following the rules of the level visuals
5. Bullets are big enough to be seen easily, but small enough to not be confused as enemy ships

CLOSING THOUGHTS

By doing what written above, Resogun did succeed brilliantly in marrying a modern eye candy FX extravaganza and a classic shoot-em-up readability (note: many oldschool shmups were sometimes also quite an effect extravaganzas). It takes a lot from the conventions of the best of the class classic shoot-em-ups, still adding its own contributions into the mix. It’s a drop dead gorgeous game while also being highly readable. In a visual sense (and I’d say also gameplay-wise) it’s a model example how not try to invent the wheel all over again, but not get stuck too firmly in the past.