7 EASY TIPS for better 2D visuals

today i'm showing you seven tips to turn the look of your game from this to this without further ado let's get started okay the first one is a simple one and mostly aimed at prototypes and game jams don't use the godot icon i see it way too often especially on prototypes or tutorials i get it the icon is there and you can simply drag and drop it into your project but it has been done way too much and i think it's pretty ugly what i'd like to see is more love towards the polygon 2d note it's a very simple note to use with which you can create all sorts of shapes and easily add colors gradients or textures and even invert the shape to create borders for example the polygon 2d node is super versatile and you can easily set up collision at red time by setting the polygon data to the collision polygon data you can also stack polygons to create more interesting design by adding details i don't know what more to say to convince you that the polygon 2d node is superior but i hope you get the idea you might think that it doesn't matter but imagine seeing a new platformer project what would look better a good old icon moving around or a nice little polygon 2d that already resembles some things of a character i made a simple top-down shooter example for you to see and look how it's already 10 times better just by using polygon 2d for everything the second advice is easier than you expect use a color palette i could tell you to worry about the colors and make a coherent choice to really set the mood for your game but working with colors is usually harder than we think so to simplify the process just go to lowspec.com or any other color palette site and choose a color palette that you like you can select how many colors you want and usually you even see it in use if we apply that to our example i think it already looks better this is especially useful when making a simple prototype or a demo if you like time this is the most important things to take care of it will bring your game from looking like a kid's drawing to a professional and coherent look really it's easy just try it out the third one i want to talk about is the world environment it's a very common one but the base of a good looking game so when you add a world of node you create a new world environment and you select canvas mode for 2d otherwise it won't work these are the two things that you want to play with here the first one is the tone map this is used to convert your linear colors into standard ones you have the choice between linear reinhardt filmic and assess this is important to use to avoid your game looking very dull and flat the second parameter is glow you've probably heard of it or at least saw it because it's often used by game dev because it's often used you shouldn't abuse it though overusing glow will make your game look cheap i won't go over all the details here but just for you to know you basically set the intensity of the glow here and by setting the hdr scale you control what color value will be affected by glow so for example i set it to 1.5 on any node if i say demodulate to something like 1.5 1.5 1.5 in row mode this node will be affected by glow you can see how adding glow to certain objects can make your game visuals look way more interesting again remember to using sparringly it does look good if you have contrast so if everything is glowing it's exactly like nothing is the fourth thing i think will add a lot to your visuals is a good camera the first thing is to add movement to your camera of course this has to fit the play style of your game but let's take a top-down shooter for example you'll probably have a camera following the player one thing you can do to make it more interesting is to lean the camera towards the mouse not only will look better but it will also help the player situate himself and understand where he's aiming to make that i simply calculate the distance between the mouse and the player then i divide by the screen half size that gives us a vector between -1 and 1 that we can use to set the offset h and offset the properties of the camera usually what we want to do here is use lerp to make the movement smoother but we actually don't need to do that manually in the camera settings there's a property for smoothing the movement called smoothing you can play around with the value until you get something you like be sure to not use a too high smoothing value otherwise your camera will be slow as hell and not feel responsive the second thing you can add to a camera is screen shake yay same as glow with this one it's something very often used in games so you don't want to overdo it you can use screen shake in many different ways but a very easy one is to use it to emphasize impact so if we take our top down shooter example again there's nothing on going on when we shoot right now so by simply adding a little screen check each time we shoot we can show to the player that the gann is actually doing something giving player visual feedback is very important you can also change the screen shake duration and intensity depending on the weapon be careful when using screen shake as it can be a bit disorienting the more often an action has to be performed the less cringing it should have for example in our top-down shooter we'll walk nearly all the time we'll shoot often and we'll die way less often so walking should have no screen shake or very very subtle shooting can have a bigger screen shake but not so much that you can't shoot straight and dying can have a big screen shake especially since the player is not in control when the depth animation plays out the fifth advice is to make use of lights it's actually easier to set up than you think simply add a light 2d note to your scene add a texture for your light it will define the light shape this can be anything in my case it's a circle with a radial gradient but for example you could make a cone one to mimic a torch lamp especially useful for those dark top-down shooters make sure to check shadows enabled to make it even better for the shadows to appear simply add an occlusion polygon node to your nodes you want to cast shadows in my case i put one on the player the enemies and the pillars and with this simple trick your scene already looks so much better you can play around with the light intensity and color the shadows intensity etc you get creative with it lights and shadows will make your world much more immersive and you can put a lot of them in 2d because it's not that expensive make sure to not abuse them though because having a lot of shadows can make the scene feel busy and hard to read this may be obvious for some but particles are absolutely awesome what makes them even better is the fact they're gpu accelerated so you can instantiate a butt loads of them without having to fear performance issues unlike the others i think you can abuse particles i would even say you should abuse their use put particles everywhere they're so versatile you can even put them in your ui to show you how effective they are i want to show you footage from france fury it's a game made in godot by rafael pica it's currently in development and it's really good there's a demo on steam right now so go check it out if you're interested i think raphael really did an amazing job with the visuals and especially the ui if i'm not mistaken he's probably using some particles when the buttons are selected and it looks wonderful you can use them to simulate projectiles impact bloodshots ambient fog fire etc pretty much everything so really just add some particles even if you don't use a texture and keep the default square it will look better than nothing my final advice is pretty simple animate everything what i mean by that is when something is moving or changing color or value whatever it should be animated of course this can be really slow to implement if you have a lot going on but you should animate at least the essential things your product will feel much more finished we had an example of that earlier when moving the camera and you saw how better it was with the smoothing you can apply this principle to everything for example with our top down shooter again we can make the movement smoother so instead of instantly changing directions we can use lerp to change the velocity in fact we'll use two different lobes one for acceleration and one for friction this lets us control how fast we move and stop you can see how it already looks better you can adjust these values to your liking and for example if we want to make the floor feels icy we can increase both values and our players will take a long time to start speeding and will slide quite a lot before stopping using lerp is cool but we'll only make linear interpolation so if you want something more interesting like a bounce effect or just something not linear you can use a twin i often use twins a lot when making ui it goes a long way making the ui more interesting one simple example is to twin the rec scale of a button when it's hovered you can make the button be bigger and hover and come back to normal when not if you don't know what transition type to use you can use the twin cheat sheets that will show you every type of transitions and also what is the effect of in or out one last way you can define interpolation is by using a curve goto makes it super easy at the top of your script simply add an export variable of type curve and you'll see it in the editor you can then add points and move the control points as you wish i won't go over all the details here there's already some videos about it on the subject i'll link them in the description well that's it for the video guys i hope you like the little tips i gave you if you have some more please share them in the comments below also if you want me to do the same video but for 3d let me know there will be some similarities but also some interesting stuff so tell me you can find the project sources on github link in the description i recently crossed a thousand subscribers and i want to thank you all for that i'm going to do a little q a so please drop your questions in the comments below if you prefer you can send it on twitter instagram or discord both publicly or in my dm if you are interested you can also wishlist the game i'm currently working on it's called dashbong and it's a high energy local multiplayer game with a strong arcade feel where you create battles by dashing and throw them at your opponents as always if you liked the video don't forget to like and subscribe if you want more follow me on twitter or instagram and join the discord in the meantime thank you for watching have a great day and i see you later bye

Channel: MrEliptik

Views: 4,034

Keywords: godot, godot-engine, godot engine, gamedev, games, development, game development

Id: WO_kBYqAQwU

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021