Task 6 - Constraints

Constraints are more or less the restrictions for polygons or faces which are used to construct shapes. Polygons need to be rendered to make look good at all and rendering can take up a lot of space and a lot of time. The more polygons that must be rendered, the longer the game will take to load. Because of this, many developers tend to try and balance the polygons with the time it takes to load and how good they actually are. A game with a lot of polygons which are rendered to the best they can would require a very good, expensive platform. PCs are usually the platform with the best graphics as they are upgradable and have very good hardware available to make games have better graphics and improve them. The more polygons there are, the bigger the file would be, which isn't exactly great if someone doesn't have a lot of space on their platform. The Xbox One and the PS4 have 500GB each whereas a PC could have any amount of space a user could stick on using external hard drives and stuff like that. The higher amount of polygons something has, the more time it will take to render and when something takes too long to render, people usually split the project up and get multiple people to render parts so the process is quicker. A polygon count is the number of polygons which are being rendered each frame.

Some games today are made to resemble those of yesteryear and have similar graphics to the popular games of the N64 or the NES. These games used 8 bit graphics and were usually 2D scrollers. The reason why some games use similar graphics and art styles in the modern day are probably for a variety of reasons. One of the prime reasons could be for nostalgia, many gamers today grew up with these low quality, 8 bit games and have a soft spot in their heart for them. A game like Gunpoint (2013) is quite similar to a game like Nightshade (1992) in terms of art style and story. Sometimes games are made with graphics like these as it will be less demanding for a PC to run and the company that is developing it may not be very big and would have trouble with making a full scale game which keeps up with other modern games in terms of graphics. Also the genre that this game is in isn't particularly popular and thus may not have a very large audience. Ergo, I doubt that a indie developer such as Tom Francis (Gunpoint) would want to spend too much money on making a game he doesn't know is going to sell much.

Another game which has a very limited graphics style and isn't particularly amazing in regards to how it looks is Hotline Miami which came out in 2012 and is based on the movie 'Drive' (2011). The game is similar to Gunpoint in the sense that it is a fairly modern game which uses older, outdated graphics. Like Gunpoint, Hotline Miami was developed by very few people which is why it could have such 'low-end' graphics or art style. Again, like Gunpoint, the graphics could have been minimal as the developers didn't know whether it would be a success and whether or not they could make any money from it, or it could have just been the art style which suited the game. Hotline Miami is very popular and has even spawned a sequel, and although it doesn't have the same love as the original game, it is still very popular. Hotline Miami is very gory and violent game which centres around the activity of an unnamed man who fans refer to as 'jacket'. Jacket receives various voicemails on his answering machine which tell him to go to certain places and massacre whoever is there, all targets being either mobsters or cops. The game is a 2D top-down action game which again, reminds people of a  number of similar games from 20+ years ago. An example being the original Grand Theft Autos.