3 Easy Effects To Make Your Game Look GORGEOUS | Let's Play Neversong Episode 4

car insurance. Hey guys, how's it going? My name is Thomas Brush. I'm the creator of a game called Pinstripe. Also a game called Never Song. Click the link in the description, please, to wishlist Never Song. I'm trying to hit 50,000 wish lists. We're at like 20,000 right now. It would really mean a lot to me if you could click the link, wish list Never Song. This is going to be fun. I'm actually going to play NeverSong inside of a program called Unity, which is what I used to make my Steam game, Never Song. It's about to launch May 20th. I figured it'd be really cool to show you guys behind the scenes, behind the curtain, what this game actually looks like. Today, we're specifically going to focus on making your game look gorgeous. So, there's a couple of effects you can do, um, screen overlays and particles to make your game look really good. And when you remove these, it actually looks kind of bland. So, you'll notice that a lot of games actually do this. So, I'm going to show you how they do it inside of Unity. And we're also just going to play through this game. This is actually episode four, I believe. Yeah, we're on episode four. Episode four of a series

of me playing Never Song. Again, please wish list. That would really mean a lot to me. Let's go ahead and jump into Unity and play Never Song. Silverman's Beach Resorts where you can go explore explor. Um, let's get back into episode 4. Let's do Let's get in Let's get back [laughter] Let's get back into episode I'm just messing with you, obviously. Let's get back into episode 4 here. Man, I have to redo all of the dialogue from the beginning of the game because I restarted it in the editor. So, let's hope uh more doesn't break here. As long as it's not gamebreaking, we're okay. Oh my goodness. Is that Dr. Smile? What are you doing, buddy? You are being creepy today. Oh, he's going that way. Hang. I got I got to go play that song. All right. I think the boxes are going to reappear and they're going to like kick me out. Hold on. There's boxes at

the edge of this village. By the way, guys, if you haven't wishlisted Never Song, please click the link in the description. Wishlist Never Song. That would really mean a lot to me. Is it going to load? I hope it's going to load. What are we going to do here? By the way, things in Unity editor, things are much slower because you have the actual editor running along with the game itself. So, in play mode, things are much faster, including loading. All right. Yeah, the box has reappeared. That's okay, though. It didn't break the game. Break those. And let's head Whoa. Let's head to the uh piano. It's going to be fun to see what actually breaks in this game in the editor. I mean, I've already broken a few things, so it's kind of I think it's going to cause certain things to appear in the wrong places, so we'll see. All right, let's quickly play this song, and then I want to take you guys to Neverwood Cemetery and really focus in this video how you make graphics

beautiful. Some techniques to make your game look gorgeous. Or if you're an illustrator or a musician, just show you some techniques on how you can make things look pretty. All right, let's play this song here. What was it called? Spederian Overure. B C D A E. All right. So, here's something that broke. Uh, this room is supposed to be opened up per my previous episodes. Guys, if you want to see the previous episodes and you haven't seen them, click the links in the description. Episode one and two and three are available. And we're currently on obviously episode 4. All righty. I got my Gambosa grips. A shiny firm set of magnetic gauntlets. Jump onto magnetic eggs to swing. Oh yeah, let's go. The other glitch is

obviously I have a skateboard and I can't actually use it. So that's kind of weird, but we should be okay. [laughter and gasps] All right, let's make our way to Neverwood Cemetery. And I'm going to open up Neverwood Cemetery. And actually, let's just stop talking, Thomas, and just enjoy the game for a second. I feel like I'm talking too much. Am I talking too much? Yeah. I think one of the best things uh one of the I guess the things that I lean on for my games is giving the player an opportunity to just explore and trust them. Um it definitely leads to some bad reviews every once in a while. Not often, but I'll get bad reviews where people say, "I wish the game was more had more tutorials." I'm just going to jump over you. I don't need to worry about either of you. We're going to make our way to Neverwood Cemetery. I already broke that in the previous play, [laughter] but it came back for some reason. Simeon came back. Um, that's okay. But yeah, just giving the player, I guess, patiently trusting the player,

giving them the opportunity to just explore. And I think the best game that does that is Breath of the Wild. When I think of Redwing Grass, it's probably more like Zoya. Zoya, that's a fun word to say. Soft and luscious and green. It smells good. Okay, so inside of Neverwood Cemetery, um there's a lot of techniques that I've used to I mean, in my opinion, hopefully make the game look beautiful. Um originally inside of Devilwood Cemetery, um it was very vertical. There was a lot of tall trees and what I ended up doing was making them actually curve and go all over the place. So, let me just show you really quickly here. This is Neverwood Cemetery. So, one of the first things that I wanted to talk about, um, before we actually get into the trees, before I talk about the curving trees and why that was so important to make them curved, I actually want to show you, um,

when it comes to your enemy design, how you can make your enemies look really pretty. That's my package manager. Hold on, let's open up the scene view here. There we go. Let's go to the Where are we? Where are we? There's a lot going on here. screen boxes. So, inside of screen box, frame six. And as you can see, guys, all of my frames are actually disordered. Um, it starts at frame six, goes to two, goes to four. That's because I went with an original game design map and then I didn't like it after I had made it, so I moved everything around um about a year into the game's development. So, here is our actual um enemy here. Let's see if we can click on him. There he is. It's called a wasp because it was originally a wasp. And one of the techniques I used, I want to focus on a lot of techniques I used to make this game look pretty. One of the techniques I used here was I created something called a trail renderer or I

should better word is I utilized something called a trail renderer and actually did um let's see here. One sec here. I think I had two trail renderers. Yep, two trail renderers. So, I have one trail renderer right here and then a white one over top of it to give it kind of an what you would see in anime when you have um those like I don't know what they call them, but they're like fast moving lines. I wanted to have that feeling coming out of our Wasp. So, this trail renderer is something that's really easy to implement into your 2D games. Just add it onto your character. And you know, I could also add it on to my player if I really wanted to. Um, let's see here. Got a pause mode. Whoa, I just exited play mode. You're going to have to cut this out, Caleb. That really, really sucks. What we're going to do is we're just going to go into Let's see here.

We're going to just go That really Actually, Caleb, don't you don't have to cut this out. So, I accidentally had exited play mode, which sounds devastating. But what I can do is actually go to the forest level, the actual scene here. Double click on it, and I believe I can just hit play, and it's going to start us in that same frame, and we should be good to go. Let's hit play. All right, so we're loaded back in. All right, there we go. So, I don't have my sword, so I can actually just give myself my sword really quick. It's basically as if we started the game from scratch, but that's okay. Let's give myself the sword and the sharpened sword. No, no, we don't need the sharpened sword. We have We need the gauntlets and we also have Okay, that's all we've got. Okay, so what I could do is actually take this um Wasp here and if I wanted to, I could actually copy this trail renderer and I could paste it inside of the player graphic.

Um, and I could add that trail renderer to the player as well. So, let's just go ahead and do that just for fun. Let's paste that in. Paste component as new and go to play mode. And you'll see I have that trail on myself as well, which is kind of fun. So, we're going to go ahead and just keep that the way it is. All right. Okay. Let's answer the phone really quick. Again, that's my wife doing voice acting for me so I could save money. [laughter] Okay, so the very first thing I want to talk about is a few um effects that we have going on in this scene. And I think actually a really good place to do it would be the next frame over. So let's jump on over to the next frame and we can talk about how we made the scene look the way it does. Um first there's a a couple image effects and there's a different different ways to do this. Um, in the new versions of Unity, these are

called profiles, but because this game was made over the course of the past two and a half years, we used more legacy effects. So, we're going to go to our camera here. Here is our main camera, Bloodwick Hollow, which, by the way, this level was called Bloodwick Hollow originally, which is actually pretty cool. I kind of wish I kept that name. Um, [laughter] but it's called main camera Bloodwick Hollow, and it has all of our image effects on it. The first thing it has is a color correction ramp. So, this is one method of making your game look prettier. [music] Now, some of you would say, "Thomas, I actually like the way it looks here." It's really depends on your preference. I preferred this because it cooled it down just a little and made that wind sound that you hear a little bit more fitting. I think it also separates the background from the foreground. So, this color correction ramp, I can actually open it up inside of Photoshop. And you can slowly see it's a one pixel high ramp. And all this does is it tells

Unity what do I want the black uh shadows to look like? What do I want the mid-range to look like? And what do I want the white to look like? So, I have all these different brightness, color, contrast, hue, saturation, all these different effects that I've placed on top of a simple black to white gradient. I save that out. And so, inside of Unity, um, it looks like this. I could also, if I wanted to, I can make it look red. So, I could go hue, saturation, colorize, pump up the red, save it out. And now, this is what blood would call it looks like. If I wanted it to be just a slight subtle red, I could crank down the opacity here to let's say 10%. It's going to have a subtle pink hue to it, which kind of looks cool. Let's bring that up just a little bit. And then let's change the hue saturation of just the white portion of this ramp. Let's do a hue saturation shift to blue. I'm just

showing you guys how this works. Here we can shift the to the black. There we go. So it goes from blue to red. So, this is what it looks like inside of Unity. So, you're getting this strange shift of color. Um, and this is obviously done in a lot of different ways inside of different game engines and also different versions of Unity. Unity uses a cool tool now called color correction. Is that really you, Ren's boyfriend? Yes, it is. Ren's the best thing ever. Anyways, want to hear an extra shady secret Gosa told me. Yes, please. Some boys have that told me if you swing your bat while hanging on vines, you can swing faster. Show off to me and give me a thrill by swinging your bat while on the vine. [laughter] Get over that ledge to your right. All right, gum toddler. So, let's obviously go back into Unity or Photoshop and remove those effects and get back to where we were.

And I will show you a couple other subtle effects that I use. Um, but first let's keep playing. As you can see, that trail, adding that trail uh to that enemy was really cool. When you have four trails moving at random directions, it it really looks interesting and adds a lot of depth to your game. I don't know if depth is the right word, but I'm just going to stick with it. I really like this trail we added to the player. That's cool. Let's get these uh heart fizzles here. There we go. Great. I just received a thrill. Yay. I'm glad I made your day. All right, let's break all these bones just because we have to, cuz why wouldn't I? All right, let's uh let's take a look at some other effects I've used here. So, you can see it looks like there's just a subtle fog rolling across the screen.

The original way that I did this was it was just a particle emitter, but Eric and I found that the particle emitter was really slow on a certain platform that I can't discuss currently, [music] um, one of the consoles. So, in order to fix that, what we did was we actually just created a fog overlay, which is a texture. So, all it is is this texture here. You can barely see it inside of Photoshop. If I crank up the opacity, you can see what it looks like here. There you go. It's just this big image of fog rolling and looping. It also has to be loopable. I don't think it is actually loopable. How did I do that? H. What I mean is this is actually going to that's not looped over here, but for some reason it works. I'm not sure why it does. [laughter] Once you spend, you know, a couple months away from your game, you when you jump back into it, you're like, "Wait, how did I do this?" Um, but that's that's what the fog looks like. So,

inside of Unity, it's looping. It's a loopable texture, and you can see it right here. Um, there it is. So, it's just this image here, and it loops. So, I have a text a script called looping texture. If I actually open up this script inside of Visual Studio, it's a very basic script. And I'm happy to show you this one because this is one that I actually wrote. Um, if we open it up inside of Visual Studio, all it is is a simple script that basically just loops the main texture at a scroll speed times the time in the update function. That's all it does. So, that's what causes it to have this subtle fog rolling across the screen. So, that's how we're getting fog. And also, I just mentioned the color correction as well. So, those are just two of the effects that we're using in the game. And you can definitely get a feel for how important this is if you remove the fog

and you remove the color correction. And then most importantly, um, if you remove the sun shafts as well, there's just a subtle sun shaft coming through. You can see that in my opinion, obviously there's difference of opinion because it still looks pretty good, I think. But I I liked the way it looked with the fog rolling. And also, actually, you know what? There's still more fog rolling. What's going on here? Let's take a look and see what's going on. This looks like there's still a little bit of fog rolling. Let's see here. Let's type in fog. Okay, we have two fog overlays. So, one was big and one was small, and it was causing some layering. So that's what we uh were doing there. So if we remove both of them, all we have now is a subtle pulsing. You can see kind of looks like it's a flip book. You see that pulsing? It's [music] very subtle. All that is, let's remove that one.

Basically, what I'm doing here is I'm showing you all of the different effects and removing them all to give you an idea of what it looks like without the effects. So this is the what's it called? Something overlay. Here it is. Texture overlay. That's what the texture overlay looks like. And it's using the particles additive shader. And it's being um looped through two different images. So here's what it looks like on. See that subtle looping that just pulsing? It almost looks like an old movie. Let's turn that off. And finally, let's maximize. And you guys can see it may look pretty as a screenshot, but there's probably 20 to 30% less ambient feeling occurring. The sound helps the subtle wind blowing, but it definitely feels a lot less alive. So, I'm going to add

everything back and we'll get started here. So, let's turn on the texture overlay. Let's also turn on the fog overlays. I don't even remember what those were. Hopefully they'll appear. Um, here we go. There we go. They're back. And then finally go to our main camera and we're going to turn back on the color correction and the sun shafts and let's get back to it. So, there's just a few few subtle effects and details that make this game look and feel the way it does. Let's save the game. Get out of here. And again guys, in my previous episodes of this let's play and also guys, if you want to see those, they're in the links are in the description. You'll [music] you could pro I think it's episode 3, I talked about the various breakable skulls. Well, those skulls are also pretty much the same as almost identical

as these breakable tombstones here. Um, same script. It's just a different image with a different colored particle emitter. Let's break this box. Okay, good. So, yeah, breakables are obviously very important um to a game. They make it feel alive and they don't even have to have a purpose. It's just fun to break things. It was him again. That doctor smile singing softly. A lullabious [singing] pain. [singing] Don't let your highly set. Singing is against the rules. The game is con. [groaning] So,

I love that. I love my dialogue. What can I say? It makes me smile. Um, so that was a really funny experience, actually. Um, basically I emailed this was an 11th hour dialogue change. That whole script was totally different for about a year. And then I emailed Dick Terune, the voice actor. I actually didn't email him. I just He's We're friends on Facebook. I messaged him on Facebook and I said, "Can you sing this song?" And he was like, "What's the melody?" And I said, "I don't know. Make one up." And he never questioned it. He never said, [music] "You know, this is this line of dialogue that says singing is for tools full or [music] labial." That's Thomas Lullabile is not a word. He never said any of that. He just went for it. and in like two hours had the dialogue done and then I would pay him and it was that that was how unprofessional

the working relationship on my part. I mean he's a very professional guy but on my part you know I just I' I'd message people hey I need this line they would do it. I'd send them money over PayPal and that was our working relationship. Um, a lot of us when we think about how movies and games are made, we think everybody is wearing a suit and tie and doing this. I think about when I think about directors and game devs, they're like they're thinking about [laughter] I don't know why they're thinking about how everything should look and they're they're going into their studio in Los Angeles and and they've got the lights and they've got the little clicky thing and uh when it comes to game devs, they all look a certain way and they act a certain way and they're drinking their peppermint mocha lattes. But [laughter] my point is is that everybody thinks that there's a certain way to do things, but really a commercially released Steam game, the the the developer is Facebook

messaging a voice actor and giving him lines to read and paying him over PayPal. That's kind of how it works for me, you know. That's uh What's going on here? What is that? What is that? Sorry, I need to see what that is. What is that? That's a mini Simeon. I have never seen that and I have no idea. Look at that. [laughter] What? Why are you there? What is this? I got to see what this is. There's a mini Simeon. What? Look at this, guys. There's a mini Simeon chilling out. There he is. Wait, what?

That is so weird. Well, the game is launching. We can't fix it now. I don't know what that is. Can I Can I break that? [laughter] No, it doesn't do anything. Okay. Anyway, let's get playing. Hey, Simeon. Dude, I see you made it through your mom's esophagus and you're wrapped in her intestines. Okay. I never thought I was going to get out of there. Yeah. I'm genuinely sorry about everything, Pete. Me, too. I should stay here with my mom. Okay. I just wish I could tell you everything. I'm just not sure you will understand. A thank you, Simeon. He's really come around, guys. All right, that's the end of this episode. Please, guys, wish list never song. It's coming out May 20th. We're trying to hit 50,000 wish lists. So, please click the link in the description. If you haven't seen any of

the previous episodes, please do. Uh they're a lot of fun. I'm trying to break down very specific elements for every episode. So, if you guys want to learn about the three tools I use for making indie games, that's episode three. If you guys want to learn about what my Steam 2D platformers look like in Uni, I'm sorry, I'm reading the title here. If you want to see what they look like inside of Unity, um, in a very generic bird's eye view, that's episode two. And episode one was just me sort of showing all the different layering that occurs and talking about the game, um, the game's development from a very generic sense. Hope that makes sense. Click the links in the description. Have fun. I'll talk to you guys later. Wish list, please. Wish list. Love you. Bye.