Picking the right art style from the start makes it much easier to both Reduce Electricity Use at Runtime and Reduce Internet Traffic.

Most of the game’s power consumption comes from its graphics: the first we should do is to tailor our Art Direction to our target experience, as it’s what will drive many technical and scope decisions.

We should ask ourselves “do we really need our game to aim for photo-realism, or is there some value striving for something different?”

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been universally acclaimed as a beautiful game, perfectly exploiting the limited resource of the Nintendo Switch. However, it uses very few high resolution textures for a game so rich!

Team Fortress 2 did this brilliantly, with lean graphics that still looks beautiful and stylish today even though the game is 15 years old.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure was built around an expressive low-tech art style, light enough on the resources to look and run great even on older mobile devices.