Why You should Avoid Showing the Sky!

so have you ever noticed that many Platformers seem to take place where there is no sky like if you think about it steam world league is largely on the ground Rogue Legacy is largely indoors same goes for hollow Knight which basically only takes place underground but why like we can look at the scene like this in Wonder Boy and it looks awesome well the reason we don't see scenes like these too often is because they buy and large don't work so let's go through each reason why scene like this doesn't work and show what you should do instead so first and foremost let's look at this Parallax layer in the foreground it looks almost 3D compared to a flat forground which you quite often see in games these layers in the front they're carefully placed to create this illution so they basically only work if you lock the camera at this point if you were to encounter a hole the effect is ruined cuz now the layers shoot up above where the camera is so the more 3D you make it the more you need to lock it to only look 3D in that specific scenario in that specific circumstance and we can see this in Hollow Knight for instance the Knight is almost always in the middle of the screen but if we jump up here in dirt mouth and walk a bit to this cool parallx foreground now the character is in the bottom of the screen perfectly aligning to create this effect so the first reason why this scene looks cool only basically works if you lock the camera so it's generally not that useful because it will come at the cost of gameplay you don't want to lock the camera when you're playing it affects gameplay now you could obviously avoid this problem to some extent by not creating the 3D illusion to begin with which we can for instance see in Steam world dig instead of having a 3D foreground it stop stops and looks flat at the front so obviously this isn't that big of a problem except that it kind of still is imagine we want to jump up into this guy a bit we really don't have to go that far up into the scene in order for it to stop looking good like already at this point it kind of looks awful and boring we only see sky but it makes sense right if we're up into the sky largely see Sky now we get the choice either we keep it boring or we make a nonsensical background where we just suddenly have stuff that shouldn't be there the big issue with being outdoors is really the Horizon and the the layers in the back because if you go up too far it starts looking terrible you basically have no level design it's just a flat walking path so it looks cool but it does so at the expense of gameplay it's not fun to play because there are no obstacles making your sky in Horizon and your map sensible is actually the real problem and we can kind of see this if we take a look at itora it has really awesome looking intricate backgrounds like look at this but if you get up a bit into the map now because it wants to be sensible it's just Treetops and Sky it makes sense but it's fairly dull looking when we know that they're capable of making this but the problem is that even in the best of circumstances trying to show a nice Horizon and a nice Parallax is just really difficult The Horizon looks pretty neat here but I also meticulously placed it to look somewhat decent and even then it doesn't actually look that nice it kind of looks somewhat empty it actually required more work to make than a scene like this and frankly it required more work than most of my scenes because when you set up your map to be sensible you have to spend time thinking about how the Horizon looks and how the forr Paradox looks if the player sees the Horizon they will think about whether the Horizon makes sense so you have to make sure that it does compare that to a scene like this you just have to place assets and it all kind of works out there is no horizon line to think of there is no Sky to think of there isn't anything that the player can point out and say this doesn't make sense the sky and Horizon ruins scenes they either look empty like this or they create dull and boring gameplay like this and we can kind of see this problem in aie it's generally a pretty good example of a metania that takes place largely Outdoors but if you take a step and look at it very few areas actually show any sky or Horizon the sections with platforming that are kind of engaging to play are consistently quite narrow and that makes sense if you have a narrow platforming area you can add a lot of obstacles and becomes more engaging to play and then they also have around three to four background layers that quickly Fade Into Darkness or blur so we could argue that why while all of this looks nice there isn't that much of a wow factor at least not when you compare it to these big Open Spaces you see the sky you see the Horizon and it looks great but as stated these areas are generally not that fun to play this section here is just a trading section that you walk past if we want to show a vast good nice open space we can't add obstacles so we can kind of see that or uses these Horizon and open area sparingly even a section like this one which is kind of engaging to play kind of narrow and still feels fairly open it actually shifts each background layer upwards this makes it look like we're on a hill and it actually avoids showing the sky and Horizon for as long as possible there's a good reason for it let's look at how we might approach creating an area we try and create engaging sections to play a small portion that can teach or test the players mechanics and then once we're done we hand off this area to an artist and they can make it pretty the artist then takes this scene and tries to imagine something around it and creat something that kind of works with the platforms given and yeah that kind of works but it's not the optimal way for an artist to make a nice looking scene the optimal way to create a nice looking scene as an artist is to be given an open flat canvas and just kind of make a painting you create a nice and pretty good composition and then fill it with your assets and that's why these scenes look good but frankly it's a bit of a gimmick it's kind of like a painting you can walk through and just because this is the best way to create a nice composition it will still take a lot of time compared to a scene like this is if you take a game like Hollow Knight you don't really see any attempt to make a horizon even more than that Hollow Knight generally has a fairly lazyy but efficient method of creating scenes and I don't mean La in a bad way if we take a look at most areas in Hollow night you can see that they create something like a cool yarn ball and then they spam that yarn ball all over the background then they create a cool looking shell and spam that all over the background then they create a nice rock in a bush and spam that all over the background weird oval glass objects bubbles spikes crystals mushrooms now I'm not saying that Hollow KN doesn't have areas that are moderately ambitious what I am saying is that if you make an area like this where you're just repeating a rock in a bush over and over you can focus on the overall depth of the scene and by the end of it the scene can often look better than a scene like this but it doesn't just look better since you don't care about the Horizon and the sky you can make the scene as narrow or as open as you want as narrow or open as the game playay demands the level design demands even more than that since you're repeating assets you can organize each asset under one draw call making it more performant if we look back at a scene like this it prioritizes looking nice so it requires a lot of Assets in order to make the Horizon feel realistic and it also requires a lot of layers so even if you don't want to repeat the same assets scene like this still generally requires more optimization to run well whereas a scene like this is likely to just work if you fill your scene with larger assets and then push it quickly to Darkness using atmospheric perspective or blur you have a really efficient method to make a scene look decent quickly which is probably why we see so many games do it but that's good in a sense it's a more efficient way of working it looks decent faster so I'm not going to say that you can't show this guy ever but I would generally avoid making a sensible Horizon as much as possible like we can kind of see this in games like aona class it partly takes place Outdoors but it's a kind of oddl looking background if you stop and think about it it's quite far from this idea of a neat looking Horizon like you have the Horizon below but then you also seem to have a horizon on the top or you can make something like a can see in eyelids where every scene is sort of filled with trees and skies and it looks pretty nice but in order to do this they kind of have to break continuity between the scenes so we can see here we have trees at the bottom and then we walk up into the next scene we still have trees at the bottom even though we're walking up we're still get trees at bottom it kind of works if you don't think about it but it doesn't actually make sense and this is actually a solution that kind of works so if you want to show the sky you're going to have to make a tradeoff and if you absolutely want to show the sky I think it's generally better to make it nonsense sensical but that doesn't mean that creating a scene like this can't have its place can be a cool effect to make if you know that the character is going to run basically horizontally with no jumping as I mentioned Hollow Knight uses it in dirt mouth and here it looks great or we can see in Ghost song you have something like a boss fight where you need to have an open room then it can make the scene look a bit more interesting and cool as a boss setting but just in general I prefer areas like this compared to this because it's easier making the game play it's easier making the art and it's easier maintain the performance thanks for watching bye

Channel: Nonsensical 2D

Views: 15,911

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Id: uiv2YYiA8fs

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024