Week 3 - Secondary Research: NieR Automata and Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This week I started my secondary research. I'm using NieR: Automata and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as my two main games to reference. In the past, when I research games, I just played them and take notes as the games go along. However, this time I came at it with a bunch of specific questions about what colours choices the games make, why those choices are being made, what choices are being made in the enemy design, what the HUD looks like and what sort of directional design is used in order to allow the player to navigate the world on their own.

With NieR, I made notes about its colour palette, the use of bleached whites and rusted browns which make the player aware of the deteriorated world. I also made a note about the enemy design in NieR; the machine lifeforms are constructed from shapes, spheres, cylinders and cubes, making them unnatural and creepy instead of monstrous. With Zelda, I observed its lack of traditional markers and use of visual placement to draw the player forward; there are no quest arrows that show where to go, instead large, distinct structures are placed within the world, making them enticing for the player to move towards. I also learned more about Zelda's target audience than I had initially thought; with a rating of PEGI 12, the game has an audience that is much larger than I originally presumed and reaches out to many adults.

This type of research turned into more than just a conflict of visuals to choose from; the secondary research also helped establish a team vocabulary. I mentioned to Alex that I was looking for the robot enemies to resemble the machine lifeforms from NieR, geometric and constructed andindustrial. He knew exactly what I meant without me having to explain in detail. When I talked to Kat about a similar design principle that I noticed was used for the Hinoro characters by artist Lang with the body to head ratio and simple colors, the resulting concept art she produced was much closer to my idea. This secondary research is incredibly useful in team projects in that it helps to create a visual and verbal common language for each member to work from rather than just pinning up images to a board.