For Indigo Prophecy, we wanted to pay specific attention to rendering. We did not want to follow what you typically see in games with clean rendering, lens flares everywhere, and shiny environment and bump mapping all over the place. We were more interested in the quality of the final image in general, like in movies. We developed a technology based on post-rendering filters that allow you to change the key color of a scene to give it a special atmosphere. Most of the scenes are slightly tainted in blue to give them this cold key color feel. Each image is treated with a second layer of high dynamic range effects, a rendering technique that increases the intensity of the light sources and slightly blurs everything on the screen. A third layer was applied with a light grainy noise too, in a similar fashion to what you see in Silent Hill. The result is nothing that you could describe as eye-candy at the first glance, but when you play the game, it really gives a unique atmosphere to the experience. Like the interface, it is something the player will forget after the first few minutes, but it greatly supports the ambiance.
David Cage --> Extract from a diary
