Visual Language

As you can tell, the beginning of the game is basically a quest to pay for your house that Tom Nook has graciously given you under the condition that you become a worker for him for a bit. In speaking of the visual language of the game, we're in a cute world here. The world is a bit of a collage in that all of the elements of the game look flat and pieced together. For example:



Check out the ground in this image. It appears almost to be composed out of cutouts pasted together. Similar to Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at the Island of the Grand Jatte these small dots of color when placed together give the illusion of grass. However, we see placed on the z plane above it, a somewhat more 3-D weed. This 3-d aspect shows us that we can interact with the object, and one of the main objectives of the game is to remove all the weeds so that your town can be "perfect." So rather than a realistic, 3-D representation of grass, the game is telling us that we should prefer the flat grass.

This really relates to the treatment of tress in the game, as like weeds, trees must be placed in the proper space to make your town "perfect." Connecting this to Ryan's post, tress are also one of your sources of income. Here's we're getting an interesting connection between nature and commerce. I think I'm going to be paying more attention to that aspect today.

By the way, my town's name is PortCity and my character's name is saratoga. The game even pronounces it right when the text is read. Crazy.

Ryan, as usual, you're ahead of me. I didn't find the magic rock yesterday.

PS. Does your digital camera work to take screen shots? I haven't tried mine yet.