TOP: A manta ray
pushes through the
fronds of kelp.LEFT: Sketch
showing the diver
character
encountering a giant
squid. In-game they
catch your
character’s eye!undreds of thousands of fish
swarm the screen as my
diver arcs into the centre of
a bait ball, merging with the
roiling mass of fins and faces,
before popping out on the
other side. The sheer number
of moving objects on the
screen is momentarily
overwhelming. Abzu revels in
moments like this, showcasing
technical and aesthetic mastery via
a digitalsea packed with beautiful
things to watch.“I always try to communicate the
game’s core ideas through the
visual style,” explains Giant Squid’s
creative director, Matt Nava. “Abzu
is about the dream of scuba diving- we wanted to deliver the
overwhelming sense of majesty, awe
and grandeur that one experiences
when diving in the sea.”
The goal of Abzu’s art was thus
not to offer a photorealistic
underwater world, but one which
evoked the sense of that world. “The
way that we represented sea
creatures and environments are
meant to be iconic and symbolic
rather than realistic, the style is an
attempt to transport the player into a
dream of the ocean.”
Abzu’s aesthetic is a mixture of
realism and simplification. All of the
creatures are based on animals in the
real world but their forms are
streamlined. They represent a type
rather than an individual.
“Reality is full of detail and is
often hard to visually parse,” says
Nava. “In Abzu, there are hundreds of
thousands of elements on the screen- huge shoals of fish, fields of
seagrass, forests full of kelp leaves.
We had to create a visual style that
could both support identifiable
species of fish and also not become
pure noise when thousands of
creatures fill the screen.”
The solution was to create a
“symbolic” form for each species
where the creature only had the
detail needed to identify it and no
more. “We designed a style where we
emphasised certain hard edges on
each 3D model, which created a
- huge shoals of fish, fields of
unique planar look. This emphasised
certain lines on the characters and
helped the fish remain clear even in
the distance.”
At a GDC talk several years ago
Nava mentioned the idea of “hero”
fish. These were creatures which
took on special significance in an area
and which could act as focal points in
busy areas. Players will encounter
hero fish early in the game – at the
very beginning one very large goliath
grouper stands out amidst schools of
small yellow tail. It draws the player’sH
Abzu
FEATURE