I was to make an educational PC game set in an outdoor environment such as the forest, where the players choose a character and solve puzzles to reveal unknown parts of the map. There are four different type of puzzle based on character selection: Mathematics for Mathematician, History for Historian, Physics for Physicist, and Arts for Artist.
One of the graphic requirements was to render footprints left behind when the character walks around the terrain, and these footprints would disappear after some time. I was to write the technical design document, and needed to look for similar game references.
Which games would have such feature that is already implemented?
How about some of the latest games with pretty graphics?
Final Fantasy XIII can be considered one of the really pretty looking games, and look! No footprints on the terrain! Or maybe the ground was hard and no visible footprints are left behind....
Ok, how about....
White Knight Chronicles was released at approximately the same time as Final Fantasy XIII, and although graphics wise the real time rendering quality cannot be compared with the previous game title, still, no footprints!
Even when the characters are walking in the desert, only some sand flying simulation whenever the characters lift their legs off the ground is carried out.
Come to think of it, I had never thought of or noticed that there were no footprints in the games I've played, until I really looked hard (for this assignment). Why is that so?
The only viable reason I could think of is... Footprints are too small to be noticed, and thus additional processing power spent for achieving this effect could be better spent elsewhere. Or, it could be that during level design, considerations for harder terrains (so that no footprint rendering is needed) have already been made, such as in Final Fantasy XIII. All the terrains in Final Fantasy XIII appear either hard, or have lush greenery such that no footprints would be left behind even when characters travel through the terrain.
If for all these games which strive to achieve realism through the eyes of the players have left such real world "realism" behind, then why should an education game, whose focus should be mainly on puzzles for players to learn from, have a requirement for a graphic effect that is not inline with the game focus?
The only conclusion I could get was... this is a lousy assignment whose actual requirements from another existing genre had been poorly fitted into an educational game. If we consider the games that really focus on graphic realism, the only feature remotely similar to the aforementioned requirement is just the simulation of tire tracks, such as in crysis:
Thinking back to my assignment, i can only summarize my feelings with o.O and =_=|||
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