Yellow Paint Problems

Many game devs, most notably Capcom with their recent remakes, have made pretty baffling decisions around the artistic direction of their games. On certain objects of importance or in areas of importance, yellow paint gets smeared on something to indicate that you can interact with it, or to give an important hint. In these otherwise very realistic looking games, it begs the question of who puts the yellow paint there (the developers), what his purpose is (being an obnoxious guide), or how it got there to begin with (hastily done last minute texture editing).

I saw some image about the dreaded yellow paint in videogames and got reminded that I have strong opinions about the yellow paint. There also remains arguments about the yellow paint, like somehow it’s actually excusable that a game going for the most realistic artstyle possible regularly breaks its own rules by smearing the suspension of disbelief breaking yellow paint of context sensitivity/situational importance.

Let’s get basics out of the way on player guidance first so you can understand why yellow paint even ends up in games, since this is the first thing people will mention when you start to say bad about pissy colors being everywhere.

Player Guidance

I don’t know what the actual term is but it’s basically giving directions to your players on how to play the game. In its most obvious form, it’s a tutorial that tells you what all of your controls do. In a less obvious form, it’s guidance that tells you things that are important, often without even needing to directly tell you they’re important.

Videogame players are kind of like movie protagonists, except they’re severely retarded and autistic and aren’t given the script and we just kind of work whatever dumb shit they end up doing into the final cut. There’s definetly something that mongoloid is supposed to be doing, he just might not really know what it is, so you kind of have to awkwardly tell him and hope he listens. If he doesn’t, this is gonna be a really boring film.

I say this to differentiate from the idea that videogames are just like real life and you shouldn’t expect some level of retardation from the player. It’s a videogame, it was designed, there’s a way things are supposed to be, and that’s why guidance is needed.

If you were to, for example, shoot someone in a videogame vs. real life, the difference would be immense. In real life, going to the gas station and putting a bullet in the cashier’s head would lead to him dying, being unable to support his family, the cops getting called, all kinds of shit. There is no script for real life so anything could happen.

In a videogame, uh, I don’t know. He might die and something might happen, but a lot of the times he’ll just die and you’ll move on and nobody’ll ever mention it again. Like, in GTA it doesn’t become a big part of the story or anything despite the fact that such an action would have effects on the entire rest of your life.

Hell, most of the time NOTHING happens. Like, the bullets’ll just go right through him because the writers and directors do not really want the character you were just shooting at dying. Sometimes they’ll say “CUT!” and ‘game over’ you, then you have to go do it all over again. How annoying, they should just let me put a bullet in Ashley’s head the annoying bitch.

What is this all to say? It’s to say that you can’t really rely on your common sense for everything because in this universe common sense is entirely different. The importance then is having the player become accustomed to this brand new common sense, to make them think that taking turns in battle is a natural thing or learning to react in a specific way upon seeing specific markings.

Where yellow paint is concerned, typically this is leading the player in a specific direction or pointing out interactivity with an object, because not every door is going to have a room behind it. So how did various games handle this specific problem?

In some cases, they just didn’t. Typically this just makes things confusing and frustrating for people, now the ‘correct’ path with all the fun stuff behind it looks exactly like every other pasted on element that only exists to act as a texture, but depending on your game this can work, typically if it’s very heavy on exploration.

Sometimes, they were very blatant. Even more blatant than yellow paint. Typically arcade games did this, such as having a giant finger point to the right and say “GO!”, but arcade games were fairly fast paced and goofy aesthetically so this worked perfectly fine. This is also notably used in Team Fortress 2, a cartoony multiplayer game where you have to be helping your team as fast as possible. In spite of this, people still get lost (poor me in 2009 trying to find her way around CP_Steel)

One ideal way many people enjoy is to utilize cinematic context clues. Great directors for films, for example, have learned to guide the audiences eyes to the most important areas of the scene first. You can see this in many Pixar films, where every element in any given scene is designed to convince you to view it in a specific way, often working.

In video games, this takes the form of a flashing light revealing a doorway, or a far off tower of interest on the horizon. It’s utilizing the same interesting looking chain each time you’re meant to climb, so that you know that you can climb, or associating certain colors or symbols with feelings such as red for ‘danger’ or on objects meant to hurt you.

And now we come to yellow paint. Yellow paint is what happens when you try to take the easy way out of guiding the player, usually because you didn’t realize such a thing would be a problem until VERY late in development, long after the ship has sailed on fixing the core problems with the art design. Let’s use Capcom’s recent remakes as examples.

The Dead Rising remake and Resident Evil 4 remake both share a lot of things in common with their artsyles, they’re very messy cluttered games with a lot going on. This looks pretty great in a screenshot, and that’s probably what they were thinking of the whole time while making it, “man look at how good that screenshot looks!”, never really thinking about what trudging around all that clutter might entail.

The problems with working your way around those areas compile when you consider how damn dark some of the palettes for these games are. Nothing pops like it used to, for example the brighter colors in their older entries that often served to help people understand which items were important and which items weren’t. Most notably in RE4 boxes that were breakable were often very bright to help them stand out, but the rooms they were found in weren’t cluttered to begin with so it was easy to understand that you needed to break them.

So, they continue with this artstyle for however long and then it comes time to really get into the nitty gritty playtesting. A problem comes up: the playtesters don’t know what the fuck they’re doing because everything looks like a bunch of big black shadows and there’s millions of objects of little importance that they have to give as much attention to as the objects that are important. The problem probably gets attributed to the artstyle pretty quickly, at least I’d hope, but then the problem comes up that it’s too late in development to just redo every single asset without blowing twice the game’s budget.

So, their strongest soldiers open up MSPaint, take the spraycan and a large dose of yellow, and just slather it all over the textures.

Using paint is obvious, making it yellow even moreso. It stands out and easily directs the player, but could still be within the realistic artstyle both of these games were going for. It also looks like shit and I’m baffled anyone defends it, especially anyone who would say the graphics are ‘good’.

There’s nothing yellow paint achieves that good art direction does not, other than making the player feel like a toddler who has to be told where to go. On top of that, it ruins the story. Like I said at the beginning, who the hell is going around putting this yellow paint on everything? Is it RE4’s mysterious merchant? How did he know there was gonna be ammo in the barrels? Who the hell painted on the wall “Go up!” during the Carlito bossfight in the Dead Rising remake? Did the merchant end up in Willamette? It’s all just so confusing.

The greatest offense of yellow paint, above all else, is that it’s lasting evidence in the final product that very little consideration was put towards the thoughts and feelings of the player. RE4R and the DR remake were both designed to look great in promotional footage to trick your dumb ass into buying the game and nothing else. In both games once you look past that chaff you see how little attention to detail was paid to just about anything.

Yellow paint does its job, but it doesn’t do it well. It’s bad. It’s an active blight on the artstyle of the game and the only purpose it uniquely serves is helping the most dense of players to barely manage playing the game.

Maybe in a different game yellow paint would work, a unique monochrome style for example, or maybe something along the lines of Mirror’s Edge, or something a little goofier, but in these realistic games it’s terrible and pointless and better methods needed to be served.

Yellow paint’s not going away, it’s way too easy and games have been becoming more and more “accessible” to the point where some of them outright give the option to remove the game portion of their experience entirely. Yellow paint means more idiots too dense for any other hints can beat it easier. The rest of us will just have to deal with it.