Study on the employment of fine art traditions in video games

Yap, Mei Ying (2026) Study on the employment of fine art traditions in video games. Final Year Project, UTAR.

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Abstract

The purposeful use of fine art traditions, particularly found-footage horror and halftone printmaking, in the 2D visual identity of the Cold War psychological horror tank game Hullbound is examined in this thesis. The study uses a practice-as-research approach, where the main technique of inquiry is the production of the game's 2D components. In order to synthesize the material aesthetics of degraded film, glitch video art, and mechanical print reproduction, a unified five-stage processing pipeline was created: greyscale painting, posterization, noise and halftone overlays, gradient map with a limited lospec color palette, and per-asset color tint. To guarantee chromatic and textural coherence, this pipeline was used in the main menu, promotional poster, and tank interior shots. Critical self-reflection and comparison analysis against the theoretical and practical precedents set in the literature review—such as the games No I'm Not A Human, Disco Elysium, and Transistor—were used to assess the results. The results show that a methodical, art-history-driven processing pipeline can create a visually cohesive and thematically relevant game identity, and that the approach is transferable to other projects and art movements. In addition to providing a reproducible paradigm for small development teams looking to base their visual direction on fine art traditions, the thesis adds a recorded case study to the field of game art research.

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