Developer: Zynga
Platform: Facebook
Genre: Simulator/Social game/Casual
Age Rating: E
Farmville is a farming simulator social game for Facebook, developed by Zynga. The player must manage a farm by means of plowing, planting, growing, harvesting crops and trees and raising live stock.
It's a freemium game and until May 2012 was the most popular game on Facebook. The player can invite Facebook friends to become neighbours which allows them to interact with them in game via visiting each others farms and giving gifts and supplies. The vector art style used feels, in my opinion, quite generic however, as the main audience appears to be casual gamers, perhaps this is simply an accessible art style that audiences will neither love or loathe?
Candy Crush SagaDeveloper: King
Platform: Facebook, Android
Genre: Puzzle/Casual
Age Rating: E
Candy Crush Saga is a casual puzzle game for Facebook and Android devices, developed by King which is a variation of their browser game Candy Crush. A "match three" type of puzzle game, players must swap different coloured candies either horizontally or vertically on a board in order to create sets of the two or three same coloured candies.
Another freemium casual game, players must unlock or pay to access certain levels. This game also uses vector art and has experienced explosive popularity with casual gamers. Perhaps its success in the casual market was also partly due to its generic style?
Moshi MonstersDeveloper: Mind Candy
Platform: Online
Genre: Simulator/Puzzle
Age Rating: E (Target audience 6-14)
Moshi Monsters is a children's website where players can choose from six virtual pet monsters that they can name and nurture. They can then travel around the online world of "Monstro City," chat to other users and play mini games in order to gain fictional currency to personalise their rooms.
It has a cute, colourful art style that is very appealing to children. As the game's main appeal is the characters and visual experience, this art style may have been a large factor in its popularity (the game has over 80 million registered users.)
OuternautsDeveloper: Insomniac Games
Platform: Facebook
Genre: Social RPG
Age Rating: 3+
Outernauts is a social RPG developed by Insomniac Games (famous for the Spyro and Ratchet and Clank franchises) for Facebook. Players must explore planets and capture alien creatures to battle with in a similar fashion, gameplay wise, to Pokemon.
The art assets are a brilliant example of stylised vector graphics, with Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin's styles shining through the artwork. Interestingly, the developers wanted the game to attract both casual gamers and core gamers, however critics claimed the freemium "pay to win" mechanics would put core gamers off. (Davidson, P. 2012)
ShankDeveloper: Klei Entertainment
Platforms: PC, XBLA, PSN
Genre: Side scrolling beat em' up
Age Rating: 18+
Shank is a 2D side-scroller beat em' up by Klei Entertainment. In this story based game, the player takes on the persona of Shank, an ex-hitman out for revenge for the murder of his girlfriend.
The animation was done in Flash and the art style took influence from cartoons, the golden age of comic books and graphic novels. (Cheng, J. 2010 quoted in Graft, K, 2010) Perhaps the developers chose to utilise vector animation due to the general benefits of vector over raster graphics- Vectors are made up of mathematics (as opposed to pixels) so they generally take up less file space than raster graphics and, for the same reason, they do not lose quality when scaled up or down.
To conclude, generic vector art is a style favoured by games targeting casual gamers as it is a safe and accessible art style. Colourful, clean, simple shapes are also appealing to children. Finally many artists prefer vector graphics to raster graphics as they take up less memory and there is no loss of quality when the vector image is re-sized.
References.
Outernauts, Davidson, P http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2012/07/23/outernauts-review/
Shank http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27039/Road_To_The_IGF_Klei_Entertainments_Shank.php
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