5 Steps To Making A Gorgeous 2D Game

If you stick around to the end of this video, you're going to realize that anybody can use simple shapes, a simple mouse, and a 1920 x 1080 canvas to make beautiful, breathtaking 2D art for your game. Let's go. Okay, the first step is just to pick three colors. We want to pick our sky color. We also want a foreground color. That's that brown color. And then also, we're going to pick a vibrant ground color. We're going to choose a sort of neon green. and we're going to slowly come forward. We're going to blend between that sky color and slowly blend into that foreground brown color. We're also going to just use simple circles here. I'm not using a pen tablet or anything like that. We're just going to use a mouse and stamp those circles. Now, we're also going to use that vibrant green for the ground. The reason we want to do that is because we want the player to know exactly what they're standing on. We want to make that pop. Now, we're going to go ahead and move to the third step here, and that is creating just weather,

right? That's shadows here and lighting. I've decided that my sun's going to come from the top right hand corner and create these very simple cascades of shadows. It's basically a reflection of those bushes behind it. You can also create shadows of trees and mountains and just blur it across at the ground. We're also going to just create some simple fog here. We've chosen a very subtle pink. You could also choose a white or a gray. and just use gradients to come up between each layer. We're also going to add some clouds. Very simple trick here is just to use circles and just stamp those behind the mountains. We're also going to create a moon here. Just a very simple moon and fade it out. And also we can create some small circles here and just cut them in half and they look like clouds floating in the sky. [Music] The next step is to create detailing between the layers. Look, if the image looks good in the abstract, then it's going to look good with detailing. I always follow that rule. And I feel like this image looks really good in the

abstract. The colors work. It almost looks real if you zoom out. Now, we can add these trees here. Just very subtle, simplistic branches with just simple lines. We can add some detailing to the bark here. Um, we're just using a gradient of dark shadows on the left side and then on the right side, we create a highlight. And then we can just duplicate this over and over and over again to create some very subtle almost threedimensional bark. Notice how everything in this image is very very simple. Just because an illustration looks good doesn't mean it's detailed. The reason most illustrations look good is because they're following realworld principles. I'm using principles of grouping. Nature tends to grow in groups. For example, moss or grass. So I'm just creating some very simple groups of moss here. And here you can see I'm not a brilliant illustrator. I'm actually kind of thinking more like a graphic designer, right? I'm just taking uh leaves here and creating a pattern and then using that pattern to well make a bush. Again, nature grows in patterns.

If you can understand patterns and also just how to create patterns in Photoshop, well, you can actually make things look realistic even with simple shapes. [Music] And we're just going to go ahead and duplicate these trees here. It's totally fine to just duplicate objects you've created. But again, we want to fade them into the background. Again, a beautiful image in its most simplest form is going to follow nature's principles. Again, we're slowly blending into the background. Things that come forward become darker, more saturated, more shadowed. And that's what we've done here with this foreground tree. Again, we're going to use circles here, cut them in half, and just create some simple leaves. Again, we're following realworld principles. Leaves, for some

reason, they fall in groups. They don't fall perfectly evenly. They fall in groups. So, I'm creating little groups of leaves here. The final step here is to add post-processing effects to your image. So, in Unity, you can add noise. You can add bloom, which is just basically scattering of light. You can also add sun shafts or god rays or lens flares. So, we've added this here as well. And that's going to be that extra cherry on top for your illustration. Yeah.