The visual language of Stray
Affordance & Denying Affordance
The property of affordance implies how a thing should be used. It is an important way to communicate to the player, and deliver guidance about what to play with or where to go without any text message. You might have seen affordances in other games. For example, a door handle implied door opening while a ladder implied climbing. Since the gameplay of Stray is inspired by the kitty’s perspective, many affordances are adjusted to match the kitty's behavior.
Pipes are one of the most important affordances. Pipes have the property of extensibility and passability because we use pimples to contain and transport liquids. For example, water pipes and gas pipes. In Stray, pipes are always in huge-flat-rounded-brownish shapes. It doesn’t only deliver a sense of safety and reliability but also makes a color connection with the kitty’s color. More importantly, the color of pipes and their shapes and functions works consistently game-wide which establishes a trust contract.
There are several other affordances that have the same game-wide consistency. For example the oil cans and decoration pipes:
Besides pipes, there are other affordances like steel rods, push bars, paper boxes, and powerstrips all of which have the same game-wide consistency.
Shapes are used a lot to drive players’ experience as well as guidance. For example, the round flat shape means safety; the square means useable and stable, while the triangle means danger and aggressive.
In this case, the safe door, the pass way, and the right way are all in rounded shapes.
Visual Language
Stray used a lot of visual languages to guide the player without any UI which brings the immersion to another level. The developer noticed that the cat’s perspective is different from humans, so they did quite a lot of work to make the camera works for the cat.
Let’s take a look at the Dead City
The first shot of this level draws the player’s attention to the center of the level instantly. (Also benefits from the composition of the level). On one hand, it creates guidance for the player, on the other hand, the camera falling close to the ground also makes sense because that’s how the cat perceives the world.
By using the squint test, we could find out that the LED light under the rain shed（lighting guidance）contrasts the shadow of the trash can significantly in order to draw the player’s attention to the trash can. Besides the contrast between light and shadow, there are a lot of color contrasts too. For example, the split complement uses red, and orange tones along with a cloud-blue base tone:
The Orange LED board indicates the main mission target(MoMo’s place) which is placed at the highest place so that no one would miss it. The blues are a side mission that still pops out from the environment. The rest of the tones are green. Another detail is that all LED boards are in rounded square shapes, which is related to the shape theory I mentioned before, it brings out a sense of safety, stability, and reliability in this area.
Again, we can use the squint test to check out the split complement color palette：
Leading Lines
