Pixel Art Class - Top Down Style Analysis & Tutorial

[Music] g'day pals welcome to a new video today i wanted to talk about top-down pixel art following on the previous video on pixel art styles i want to talk about styles in this perspective lay down some principles for top down pixel art and then maybe do a bit of a tutorial on starting your own okay you ready let's get into it all right top down pixel art this is an area that i don't have like a whole lot of experience in i haven't made many games with this uh format and um yeah it's not it's not something i spent a lot of time doing but it's been really fun doing a bit of research and breaking down what i've noticed and what i can share with you today so let's do uh do it like we did last time and look at a nice big grid of games that have this this top down feature so what is top down it's essentially a perspective where the camera is above the action looking down in a kind of orthographic way where everything is laid out as if it were on a grid right so you can see the perspective of things like uh square plots of land appear rectangular to us they don't appear to fade into the background i'm essentially going to be protracting out from games that inspired the ones that we'll be talking about today here we've got the original final fantasy this is uh that's on the nes this is uh we're looking at secret of mana and then uh chrono trigger this example here of chrono trigger is kind of like the one outlier where you will ever see a sky and an ocean in a top-down setting like this this is a very unique perspective trick i think it works okay in the snes but it's a very seldomly used technique and it can go wrong very easily so use it at your own discretion working back on handheld we've also got the pokemon series of course and on the snes uh the legend of zelda are linked to the past this is i think probably like the granddaddy of most of what we think of as like um kind of like in vogue or fashionable in a top-down game i think a link to the parts really set the scene for a lot of that stuff so pulling out we've got a lot of more modern kind of indie games that use this top-down format obviously stardew valley is one that is very popular that people make games in the image of we have games like cadence of hyrule which are almost like a sequel to or like an indie take on a sequel to a link to the past you know in the same world same sort of palette this is moonlighter more stylized flatter this is garden story a much more stylized and flat example as well and then moving sort of in this direction we have games like eastwood like we saw last time this is battle axe really really interesting very detailed art style here and eldest souls which i think is also very gorgeous too i've tried to stick mostly to similar environments here so that we can make good comparisons so we're looking mostly today at outside environments grass forests that kind of thing one thing that stands out to me as i look at all these screenshots beyond the fact that they all share the same perspective is the way they manage contrast and that's what we're going to be talking about today for the most part unlike 2d side scrolling games where the character sits at the junction of the ground and the sky and the sky is quite washed out and can allow the character to stand out against it top-down games have all of those layers compressed and you're looking straight down at them so you know you don't see the sky you see the character the ground grass you know out of bounds areas versus areas that you can walk on those are all mingling and sharing the same space and so the way that these things are presented visually is really important because it's much more important to explain to our eyes visually you know what the different parts of the scene are we can't just expect certain regions of the scene to mean certain things like we can inside scrolling we have to be able to interpret that by looking at them as we scan around the screen so the most obvious point here has to do with grass right grass is present in almost all of these this is really obvious in games like a link to the past where the grass is essentially one flat color that's uh sort of spiced up with a few different sprites here and there in games like this you know you can imagine if we tried to draw every blade of grass here even with the the colors that we that we've chosen here which are quite similar to each other if we were to fill this entire space with those grass blades it would be harder to tell link apart from the ground it would create what we call visual noise so areas that we walk on are really obviously areas that we want to be kept clear of focus the character of course needs to stand out and in all of these games um using more higher contrast colors is an easy way to actually have the character stand out things like outlines tend to be used the same way they do in other games to have the character stand out and i would say probably even more so having that black outline is used very commonly in this perspective having there be more dense uh details and more saturated colors is also common what's interesting in top down games is because of the way the light is often coming from the same place the player is looking from it's harder to use light and shadow to make a distinction between things that the player can walk on and things that they can't in a platforming game that's really obvious because we can just light the top edges of all the things that we want to be able to step on but here you know from the top looking down you know we should be seeing a lot of stuff be lit up and not a lot of stuff uh be hidden from the light so these games tend to use noise as a way of modulating the difference between things that you can and can't step on and this is part of contrast as well so looking at eastwood here you can tell that we can't walk here because of just how high contrast and noisy it is right it's kind of like a way of passively telling our brain hey this isn't somewhere you can go i think this is something that kind of comes back to nature in a way i mean like it's almost the way you think of forests right versus clear paths we want to walk in bright open areas we don't really want to walk in noisy areas where it's hard to see predators so just looking at these i mean i i think i make the point pretty clearly but if that wasn't enough let's look at an example where i would say in battle axes case i think the art here is is incredibly high quality it's obvious how well these details are constructed and that the colors are beautiful nice to look at but i would say it's quite difficult looking at this frame to actually tell the difference between what's environment what's characters what's enemies what you can pick up and where you can walk these bounds these sort of variances in contrast and in the difference between signal and noise aren't really here because everything's detailed and everything is quite saturated so what are these principles let's take a look at breaking them down okay so one of the most important principles is modulating contrast and you can see here for things that are supposed to be obvious to us like the player objects you can pick up npcs these are all important to us right we need them to be signals essentially that we can see on screen at a glance and we compare that to things that are of less significance so out of bounds areas and terrain high contrast can be used when thinking about these things and for the most part all of these things should be able to be found on the terrain so the terrain being below this line has low contrast and left of this line being insignificant that's kind of what we want to use for our terrain because all of this stuff sits on top of it so it needs to be different in contrast on the flip side out of bounds areas they can be high contrast because they don't overlap with the terrain and actually the difference in contrast between out of bounds areas and the terrain creates the separation in a lot of these cases so a little design principle that i came up with here was the idea of separating clear paths versus dense forests those are the two kinds of domains that our eyes track against and those serve as the canvas on which our npc's objects players sit on i want to take a really quick second to stress the difference here between noise and detail signal and contrast okay so noise and signal are kind of two lines on a scale that relate to how eye-catching something is okay so both this and this are not very eye-catching even if this is more detailed right the the the non-walkable terrain is detailed there are details there but their signal to noise ratio is low because of the amount of contrast used the distance between the darkest colors and the brightest colors is very low it's a small distance so our eyes are comfortable just glossing over this area even though it's got detail on the flip side looking at this bush here we can actually see quite a lot of contrast and our eyes are drawn to it mostly because of the separation between those black outlines and the green leaves the way that our eyes work essentially our eyes are really great at shape detection and so whenever shapes are closed like this that draws our eyes to those areas and especially a cluster of closed shapes is very very uh eye-catching to us it's just what our eyes are like designed to stare at so if we zoom out here and look at the entire canvas you can kind of see the different parts where your eyes get caught on areas where the signal-to-noise ratio changes right so this scarecrow standing in the sort of blank field there's a lot of detail in these textures right this is it's quite uh noisy this texture but because it's noisy and not very high signal it allows something that does have a lot of signal to kind of like stand out to us right we see the scarecrow the closed shapes the black outlines and immediately our eyes get drawn to it so now that we've established the role of contrast in making a distinction between signal and noise how do we explain the difference between these screenshots in terms of their actual aesthetic interest you know how do we make things look good or interesting when we have low contrast so preserving interest when it comes to preserving interest and actually having lots of detail in your image without drawing too much attention this comes to the question of how do we have differences in color without differences in contrast okay so light can be broken down a few different ways oftentimes we talk about rgb for red green and blue those are the channels that we use to actually store the data that describes light but in a lot of uh image editing software you'll also come across things like brightness hue and saturation to describe colors okay and what we can do is we can take one of these axes and we can change them slightly just one of them and then detail our image with just that slightly different color and what you'll end up with is something that is low contrast but high detail so here we've taken this green sort of area of grass and if we just move up right into the into like a slightly different brightness we can draw you know a second layer of grass it's still very low contrast but it's high detail likewise you know we could instead change the hue we've got yellow tones and blue tones here instead again high detail still low contrast right this won't attract your attention quite as much as if there was a black shape standing you know in the middle of this and finally we could change the saturation so you know we've got more saturated or less saturated greens more grays more vibrant colors and uh that's like a very easy way that a lot of these games create interesting terrains that need to be low contrast but give them lots of nice detail so yeah changing only one or two of these channels very slightly can be enough to create that diversity to uh to really fill out your image even if you've established low contrast in an area now i can hear you saying but adam if we just change these colors like this what happens to our palette this is a really good question i know that i've stressed in the past the importance of a palette and with a lot of my games most of my games i do use quite a constrained palette so the danger of actually betraying that palette and just having colors go all over the place becomes a question and and the threat there is that we lose our sense of style right the consistency goes out the window if we just have colors everywhere so how do we preserve a style something that feels cohesive when we don't have a palette because we're changing these colors so subtly that's what i want to talk about next so a quick kind of like statement that i want to make not necessarily a definition but just a property of style is that style's really about consistency in decisions right when we say something is consistent what we're really saying is that all of the different decisions that go into determining what that thing is follows some sort of pattern that we can follow right that we can we can identify and that the times that that pattern is broken are either none or very few times okay so it's about consistency in the decisions even if hard limitations like palettes aren't present so let's look at stardew valley for a second stardew valley has a lot of colors here on screen and a lot of different colors right so even in the green space we've got a lot of different greens being used here now you might say oh you know they're breaking palette in all these areas but you'd be lying if you said it didn't look good because it does look really nice this is partly because it models reality right if you go to like a forest like this you see a lot of lush and varied colors of green even inside of just like looking at the grass you know different trees different bushes different species of plant all have different hues and and even in a single plant you can have lots of different vibrant shades of yellow and green so this lush rich use of color is really important in actually bringing out what makes stardew valley so so good that aside there are areas i would say in this frame where we could criticize and we could say okay where are areas where decisions are inconsistent so the first i would say is how brightness is modulated looking at the tower that asset from the bottom of the tower to the top of the tower all of the bricks seem to be following quite a flat view of color they all have you know light edges on the top and darker parts in the creases between the bricks but looking at the top brick and the bottom brick they all have the same sort of base gray but if we look at this sort of rock face here the colors at the bottom of the rocks are much much darker in high contrast than those at the top so the way that the brightness and contrast are being modulated is different in different parts of the same image in ways that should be the same right these are both vertical areas that are being elevated and sun would essentially because they're all above ground the sun should essentially be hitting them pretty much the same way so i would say this is an area if we go back to the to the original this is an area that to me sticks out a little bit a second way looking at the same image would be tone okay so this same rock face here if we look at this yellow it's almost the same as this kind of clay dirt that's uh just by the edge of the water here they're essentially the same because they're all just the dirt that's you know the grass is growing out of but if we look down just before we hit the surface of the water we have quite a shift to into like warm tones obviously the water makes it cool once we get past that but just here we can see there's like a drift into like a warmer orange yet over here as we go down into a more darker space instead it becomes a lot cooler and a lot greener sort of like a greeny brown versus a warm brown so whether or not either of these are realistic i mean you could make arguments for the warm tone because it's kind of establishing this sort of very summery uh nice light effect in the same shot having this kind of like very high contrast gray green brown situation is a little bit uh conflicting right like why would these colors go in different directions under the same circumstances so again not necessary for us to have a palette but it is necessary for us to make similar decisions across the scope of an image now let's compare that to eastwood eastwood is in my opinion this is like a masterpiece when it comes to just the visual composition i think this is like the best example of the set that we looked at because it's so easy to tell the difference between uh where you can walk and where you can't but there's such a consistency in the rules that describe these things okay so let's take a look for a second all of these colors here are in the same sort of color space right it's very low contrast overall and that makes it seem very stylized because there aren't any places in the image that break this there are no parts that are suddenly very bright versus very dark they're all in the same color space all of these colors all of the brighter colors are slightly more saturated and slightly warmer and across the image contrast and brightness are actually varied based on pathing which is really really interesting what's really brilliant about this is the way contrast is being used in a very very subtle elegant algorithmic way to actually tell you where you can and can't walk right so navigable areas are very soft very similar you can easily just wash your eyes over this and not really see anything but as soon as we get to this edge you can see the contrast ratio is a lot higher and the differences in color are a lot higher just at that edge right like this yellow and this green next to this darker color here those are the most different colors we've seen as we've moved across here so far but then as we work back we can see the brightness starts dropping down and the contrast starts cutting away so looking at it here it's so impressive how consistent and smooth that transition is but how clear it is as a rule right we can see where the rule is introduced and we can see it over the course of these sprites fade into something that is less eye-catching but definitely less navigable there's almost like a sense of like visual gravity that's kind of like pulling you out of the dark areas and towards the softer lighter areas and you know this is something that again it's kind of modeling reality in a way but it's also very very clear visual communication so shall we have a try putting some of this together let's do it all right so here we are in a sprite and i've just got a reasonably large canvas open this one is a new canvas it's 640 by 360 set to indexed the reason why i'm using indexed here is so that we can shift colors around as we go because we're going to be building out our own palette here all right so i'm just going to like wipe my entire palette i'm going to start with a new index and just like come over here to the spectrum and pick a color in this case we don't have any reference so i'm definitely going to be changing this but i'm just going to start with something so let's delete that and that's a decent green it's not a bad minty kind of green if we want to go for something like more washed out or pastel i'm not really sure what i want to do with this yet so we're just going to start copying this color out and then maybe like shifting it right and i'm going to i'm just going to do what i usually do which is shift down and towards a little more blue as we go down and a little less saturated but i'm going to be very very subtle with this so you can see it's almost impossible to tell the difference between those two colors but this is going to be walkable terrain so we're just gonna create like a nice maybe like a kind of like a t intersection of uh walkable terrain so i'm gonna make some colors now that match this palette uh and i'm gonna build them around this minty green so maybe we'll take another color here and we're going to take the same thing but we're going to shift it kind of like up a little maybe this color can be like the dirt underneath nice cool so here we can do some you know patches where the grass didn't quite make it and our goal is really to to minimize the amount of draw that this has on the eye we're really just having very very minimal impact on on the vision here we want it to be you know different enough that we can see some difference but uh not so different that it catches our eye now i'm going to take this green and create a bit of a like a highlight color maybe one that's got some more yellow in it and it's a bit stronger we'll add that to the palette as well i'm going to use this as our uh like highlight on any blades of grass that we have sticking up i think we probably want to go a bit more green here and then we can underscore those with some shadow and that creates a nice very very soft bit of detail there cool so we've already started with very very simple very soft yet different details just by changing saturation a little bit a little bit of hue slight amounts of brightness here and there and already we've got you know three or four different colors that we can use to create some unique shapes and interesting details that don't pull focus um you know we'll still be able to look at this and know where the player is supposed to be walking now i want to take this dirt collar and i want to do like a shadow version of that so that we can create some depth between the grass and the dirt so i'm going to lock this off again go down slightly from this color here just drift down and then add that to the palette so i'm going to take this color here that's like slightly darker and maybe we can start using the shade brush to create a bit of a distinction between these two so i'm going to take my two colors go into this press shading and then start drawing underneath here right on the top edge because that's where the shadow is going to be visible now immediately i know this isn't going to be quite right and part of this is the depth part of it is the color but if we unlock this and then just start shifting down again we can actually start working in where we want to go and i think yes desaturating much much more helps us out quite a lot there actually okay so we can take these two colors and just wear them back now we want to be very subtle maybe even more subtle than this maybe we could go even closer it's just enough to draw some distinction and then we can do things like add little cracks and extra details here if we want and just finding shapes here that work really i'm not really trying to force too much just doing a little bit of exploring it's nice to fill in the edges usually rather than the center the center keeping it nice and open gives us a bit more space now for this to really make sense um to actually explain the differences between these two colors here we want some objects above the uh above the terrain maybe some trees stuff like that and i'm going to lock this off gonna take this color here and then shift it way down let's create like a lot of contrast and add that color and then see if we can just draw some some shapes here that really create that distinction now i want to play with the idea of there being shapes first and then we can work in the details of what those shapes are but really i'm just talking about like okay how do i want this you know this edge to look this is obviously not you know game assets this is just like a picture it's just a mock-up so we can really do whatever we want here and again my goal at the moment is just to just to find the right colors so i think i want it to go a lot darker maybe oh that sort of blue is nice yes i like that quite a lot let's lock it off again find an even darker tint and then we can paint that in as well so i'm going to start just filtering in the idea of there being sort of like trees and i'm sort of trying to create you know i'm thinking in my mind that the trees are kind of like this right maybe even a little more top down like this so that we can get more of a perspective on them yeah maybe maybe closer to this and that's just what i'm doing as i'm filling in these shapes here you can see this if you complete that shape you know that's kind of where that's going essentially but i'm using a big brush here because i don't really know yet what i want to do with this so there's no point going in here with a single pixel brush and defining details when we don't actually know what the overall shape is going to be and that's kind of the the motto of doing this kind of mock-up work you're not creating assets yet i mean you might like some of these things might become assets and if i'm going to do some sort of tiled trees like set up here you know i might take one of these zones and turn it into an asset but right now all i'm trying to do is get the feel right so i don't really know exactly like what i want out of all of this so there's no point going for quality when i can go for quantity right it's really about the volume of the space then the exact details of what's going on at least at this stage later on we'll add some details and that's kind of what i'm doing here really i'm just thinking about okay what do these edge shapes look like as we work our way over here and then now we can start coming back down here and following this this line a little bit more and now that we've got some sense of shadow something that's actually casting this darker shade now it makes a bit more sense what it's there for so at the moment i'm just sort of tearing in a little bit into this space just to create more of those shapes just to feel it out a little bit and what i'm really looking at is the contrast between this space and this space and where i want this to be pulling focus and where i want it to not be pulling focus so most of the contrast when this is all done will be here at this line and then i want to wear that back so there's much less at the end so i'm sort of thinking about this as a gradient of contrast and detail so there's going to be more noise you know more shapes here at the edge of the tree where the light meets the shadow right and it doesn't really matter at this stage what those shapes are just sort of blotting them down there's going to be light and darkness all over the place but you can kind of see what i'm going for here right where they're just becoming more sparse and less obvious less eye-catching as we work back maybe this is an opportunity for a slightly different tone so i'm really liking where this is going um if this is looking a little strange right it's because we need to work in these edge details so if you take the grass shapes and start plotting them up through this you'll start having it feel more like it's a it's a change in the grass rather than just some random you know brown splotch so like this you can even maybe work it back a little bit and you could start also fanning it out by uh having like the different shades sort of cross over in little bits here and there and it might be nice to just work in some of these extra details just little highlight bits and darker bits just little bits of variance having the colors be shared like that helps it be more consistent so so even though we're picking these colors kind of at will we are still up obeying the kind of logic of a palette and we're trying to reuse colors where we can so we could probably take some of these details and just import them over here maybe we'll just be a bit more careful with that you can start seeing now the traces of like an asset being created right like these details being repeated this really does feel quite quite close now to like an actual game screenshot i think we could go a little bluer with these colors i'm just going to shift them ever so slightly over and it might be a cool idea to put a building here i'm thinking maybe like a house of some sort and i want to try to start with a color that i've already used and i still don't really know what the shape of the house is yet or anything like that so i'm going to try and just create something and not get again not be too picky about any of these decisions that we're making get some perspective on here i can kind of think of this as i really like kind of tudor style houses i do a lot of fantasy stuff so i'm going to see if i can create something that's kind of fantasy so let's go for maybe like another few other colors here i'm just going to start picking them up a bit and then placing them down and then seeing if i can work them to where i need them to be that's not bad see if we can find the back edge as well some level of depth here on the front and then instead of this color i think i want to go for something a lot more generally just eggshell and i'm actually kind of feeling this could be a bit bigger this building maybe we double it have the same detail on the back side this kind of reminds me of the like vermillion city gym or viridian viridian city jimin pokemon blue it kind of reminds me of giovanni's gym cool now as i look at this this feels much much more saturated than this so i might take like all of these colors and up the saturation so i'll take all of them like this just grabbing all of them gonna go edit adjustments hue saturation and just see if we can play with the saturation just bump it up until it fits i think even that is a lot better if we go all the way it's too much but that's where we were that's feeling a lot better it doesn't need to be much brighter or darker i think that the brightness is fine but i think bumping the saturation up is the way to go there yeah that's pretty good and i'd like to add a color as well to this that's kind of like a tile highlight you know just like the top edge of some of these roof tiles just to give it that specular look right where the light is catching it and these details help to really tell the difference between like something that's a solid that we can't walk on and something that we can walk on right all of the saturation and the contrast between these colors here is very close together these colors very sharp very rigid so that we know because of the difference between these two colors there's something happening here and it's not this very smooth transition it's not somewhere we can just walk freely so then i would just consider like what these roof tiles look like this might be a little too noisy at this point maybe we're pulling too much focus that looks like it's going to make a nice texture there as well too having these run along and i probably wouldn't go crazy i wouldn't like put the same shape all the way up but just hinting at it here kind of gives us a nice uh a nice start and if we can kind of work it into some of these shapes here if we can you know indicate that there is a texture in the points where elements meet then we don't have to tile the entire space now i want to make quite a distinction here between rooms that we can enter and ones that we can't or at least like places that are doors and doors and top-down games tend to be very dark right very dark shadows so that's what we're going for and i just want to go a little darker right here on the doorstep and in fact maybe all the way around the building if it's casting a bit of a shadow so i'm just going to go to the layer below take this color and then go to the next darker shade and put that all the way around and this might be time for another color i really like the idea of almost outlining it with the really hard shadow but i just i think we need to be a bit more definite as well with our shapes and what we're doing with them and honestly i don't really know if you would see this shadow like this but it's kind of interesting to look at so i'll keep it there it feels it feels kind of right now of course again because it's a shadow it's going to have these grass shapes blending the parts where the shadows meet because underlying through all of this is grass right so even here you would see grass kind of adding some noise to these shadows it's a bit tedious but you get the you get the idea i think i would probably add another shade to this just to separate this a bit more i feel like the the shade we've got these two colors are very close together we could just go a bit darker now what i'd like to do is see if i could bring this set of trees over into this space right now they're very it's very freestanding it feels like it's its own thing but if we can bring the trees up into it then i think it'll be perfect so let's put it on top of the trees just to create some shapes for context shadows are an excellent way of grounding your objects into the scene once you cast a shadow from something suddenly it feels like it's there otherwise it kind of floats it's a bit bit strange to look at now of course i would never make a game like this i wouldn't just sit here and especially an rpg and just draw shapes for every screen in the game you would want to create assets out of this stuff so you know rest assured after doing a mock-up like this you could take some of these elements and turn them into assets you break them down into pieces and start making tiles out of them stuff like that what other things can we do to kind of create some more interest in this scene we could probably add something like a road in here you know it wouldn't be out of the question to have like a footpath coming from these buildings like this that's actually not so bad you know what i'm going to do that and we'll see if we can just make this without ruining any of the detail we created nice okay i'm really happy with where this is right now i think from here the only thing i really want to show you as far as like sending you on your way on this intro is just getting some detail on some of these trees i won't do the whole thing because it's going to take ages but just to show you what that might look like essentially it is a texture so it's going to be trying to create some repeating shapes that indicate you know the clusters of of leaves that the trees are made up of and we want to use some nice interesting contrast with the colors and we want to be able to repeat those textures while changing the colors into something that's lower contrast and more homogeneous as we move to the to the edge we've done trees like this before in the alpine parallax tutorial that i gave so you should be familiar if you follow my tutorials i'm a little concerned here about the fact that these are so similar to the color next to them but we might be able to to do something here we'll see what happens i want to really shade the tops of these trees more than the bottoms i think we want to go into a different color space i think it's too similar i would like to go towards something more blue and just to break down my thought process on this essentially i've got like let's just say we've got our shape that looks like this right this is like the the overall shape that we've got for the for the top and then every shape beneath that is kind of like a flick like this duplicated a few times okay and that's like a layer and these trees have a few layers okay so let's just pretend these are some details in our tree at the top i want to see these shapes inside of this so i can take this and start working them in and then if i want to go even further these shapes would probably have little kind of like details at the very edge where they're catching the light a bit more so i could do the same thing internally inside of this but one step up so we could call this the body right of the of like a frond so the body color here is the same as this and then the highlight color is one step up but in this one the body color is the stepped up version and the highlight is even higher okay and that lets you layer them see and now we've actually created one two three layers of the same pattern but with three different color steps right we've descended down we've descended down the space over the course of those three steps so that's kind of what i'm going for here is applying the same logic but stepping it down as i go and maybe for the sake of argument we'll just see if we can do like the bottom of these trees i'd like to just touch on that so i'm just going to take this timber color and see if we can work it in at the bottom of these trees and i could see us going a lot darker with this honestly i could probably take this color and just drop it down another notch maybe shift it towards blue oh that purple is kind of nice that's not so bad though that's okay cool not a bad start this definitely needs like a ton more detail you know across all of the areas you know these trees are nothing yet they're all just a big big mess but you can see kind of what i'm going for here i hope much better so i think this would be the shape that i would sort of work with from here just take this and see if i can like copy it and paste it and move it around and replicate it around the map you sort of have to go from the top down if you're just going to be copying and pasting so for the sake of this lovely tutorial i'm just going to be copying and pasting this shape just to give you an idea of what it might look like if we're closer to being finished uh i want to replace all the colors down essentially and just knock out all the highlights so they're flatter right there's less range now because we've just taken away all the highlights which means now this front edge of trees is a lot more standout than any one that we put behind it so i think we'll leave it there otherwise we'll be here all day and tomorrow as well i hope that you learned something and i hope that you have a bit more confidence now moving into the start of your own top-down journey i will probably elaborate on this in the future doing things like uh character animations or objects things like that and uh yeah that's about it for this tutorial if you enjoyed what you saw today please consider subscribing and uh until next time hey pal thanks for watching and thanks most especially to the patrons and twitch subs who support this channel and my gamedev project insignia to find out more click the links in the description below and uh if you like this video tell youtube by clicking the like button and then youtube will tell me and then i'll make more videos that's nice thanks again and until next time [Music]

Channel: AdamCYounis

Views: 51,758

Keywords: game development, pixel art, game dev, game, video game, indie games, stream, tutorial, top-down, eastward, stardew valley, a link to the past

Id: 2JCG4fCmeHk

Length: 43min 50sec (2630 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021