The art of choice: how a visual style is born

July 22, 2025

Once upon a time, video games used 8-bit graphics and looked very similar, but now, despite the same name, the variety of visual solutions is incredible. The industry is now quite advanced both in terms of technical capabilities and in terms of the fact that our users are becoming more sophisticated. There are incredibly diverse games available on the market today, from hyper-realistic shooters to casual match-3s, from masterpieces by big publishers with their recognizable style to incredible titles from small indie development studios.

Graphics is one of the most important components of a game because it is one of the first things that attracts the player's attention. Of course, no one will play a game that is very beautiful but terrible in terms of game design, but usually these two components work together. The right visual language for a project only enhances the player's immersion in the game's atmosphere. And for some projects, their visual style becomes a calling card, making them recognizable around the world or setting industry standards for many years to come.

So how do you decide what the game should look like? Is there a ready-made algorithm for choosing a style for a project? Actually, there is such a theory, its founder is Scott McCloud, who is a famous comic book author. This scheme is called the big triangle and is a map of all available visual styles. It looks like a triangle with such concepts as abstraction, symbolism, and realism at the top. Accordingly, closer to the top of the triangle, the features of the graphic will become more pronounced (realistic, abstract, or symbolic/stylized). It is considered a good combination when the visual style of the game is approximately in the same place on this scale as the game mechanics.

Let's take a closer look at which game projects could be on each of the peaks and which ones would be somewhere in the middle. One of the most abstract games is Tetris, which does not reflect reality but can still be interesting. The most realistic games are simulators, where graphics, physics, and game mechanics are the most accurate reflection of the real world and processes. And as an example of a symbolic game, we can cite text games where there is no image of events, physics, but they are still perceived as interesting, such as Galatea.

Each game can find its place in this scheme. For example, Mario will be located far from realism, somewhere in between symbolism and abstraction, as we see broken physics, stylization, but we can still draw parallels with something we meet in reality.

Or, for example, the Sims would be located between realism and symbolism, far from abstraction. In the game, we see a depiction of a familiar life with the birth of children, health care, and work, but this life is depicted conventionally, and the characters and the world are still stylized. So the map of the games we've reviewed looks something like this:

However, not all studios use this method to determine the direction for artists. Sometimes visual decisions are the result of optimization or technical decisions of the team. For example, the legendary shooter Borderlands got its unique style with strokes due to the need to optimize models for better game performance. This visual solution made it possible to use models with fewer polygons.

For some studios, visuals are very important, and they specifically develop a unique style. A great example of such work is Hades, which once became the Game of the Year and received a lot of praise for not only its mechanics but also its visuals. Users liked the game's style so much that a large number of visual clones of the game appeared over the next few years. Gorgeous color schemes of locations, charismatic characters, beautiful stylization, all of which do not leave players indifferent.

For the most part, there is a division that large companies release games with a more homogeneous visual style, in realism or casual graphics, for example. The familiar style provides a kind of guarantee of stability, because players have already seen it and accepted it for this particular genre of games. At that time, small development studios experimented with styles more often, not always successfully, but there are cases when such experiments changed the industry and their games became eternal classics.

We are happy to help with the realization of your project, no matter what option you would not have considered. Our specialists are ready to help with the implementation of classic, reliable styles and are happy to go in search of new interesting visual solutions.