Drawing for the ages.

There’s not much point in aiming for photographic realism when working in realtime 3D. You can try hard and get really close, but you can only get as close as the current technology will allow you. So by this time next year, chances are that your current incredible accomplishment will look dated.

Instead, we should attempt to design for the ages. Create something that will always look good. There’s no point in denying the limitations of the technology. Recognizing them and working with them, will lead to far better results. When we look at a painting by Rembrandt, we know it’s not a photograph. But does that make the work any less fascinating to look at?

So, even though I do aim for a certain realistic feeling in Bientôt l’été (as opposed to cartoony, abstracted or stylized), I want the visual elements in the game to look interesting onto themselves, not as representing reality so much as referring to it.

Realtime 3D is a technique for creating synthetic images. Aesthetically, we have more in common with painting and animation than with photography or film. But it is a medium that is more modern than photography. Maybe it’s even the first major new technology for creating images since photography. It’s easy to see how photography superseded painting. Now we have to figure out in what ways realtime 3D can supersede photography.