Let's Review Your Games — Ep. 052 (Part 2)

open up Photoshop and kind of show you what I meant by adding some distance um between the foreground and the and the background. Uh so let's go ahead and throw that up on here. I'll [clears throat] throw up onto Photoshop here. Um is everybody here? Come on in. Come on in. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. So this is currently how it looks, right? And it's kind of hard to see the ground from the background. Um
Hey listen. This is where I sensed the unusual organic activity I mentioned. They were probably taken by the the AI mother.
Yes, this was the research team's camp. Where are they now? I'm going to open up Photoshop in just a sec. I just want to get through this. Okay, so let's go ahead and open up Photoshop and I'm going to show you what I mean by creating separation between the ground and the background, okay? So

right now this is this is something that I've I had to learn the hard way cuz I was at a trade show a long time ago when I was like 18. I was at I was at well I was at GDC. And people were playing my platformer and they were like, "I can't tell between this I don't know that I can jump on this or can I jump on this or can I jump on this or can I jump on this? Can I jump on this? Can I jump on this?" And you might think, "Well, don't be a dummy. It's obvious you could jump on this." Well, you don't want it to be kind of obvious. You want it to be super obvious. Especially when I'm looking all around me at all the beautiful artwork and all the enemies and getting attacked and solving puzzles. You want it to be obvious. So, let's try something really quick here. Let's see if we can separate out our layers with the magic selection tool. We cannot. So we're going to have to use the lasso.

So, this is our polygon lasso tool. I'm going to grab this and just quickly sort of select in a rough kind of way here. Um the ground to kind of show what I would do here. And this is not something that's difficult to do for the developer. I think that those those things that I mentioned for the developer to change, they're not big things and I think they're honestly low-hanging fruit. And what I mean is they're not um difficult things to do. So, this one is not difficult and I'll show you what I mean here. Uh go ahead and just grab this. It's not going to be a perfect selection. I I promise you that, but you'll understand, hopefully, what I mean um when I do this really quick here. So, let's just add a stroke to it just because I didn't perfectly select the stroke. So, let's just set that to like four. Or maybe how about five?

Yeah. We might not even need it, actually. Okay, and then what I'm going to do is behind the player, you're going to put a big color overlay. And this might make it look more like Hollow Knight, if I'm being honest with you. So, we might have to be a little bit more careful, but we'll see here. Okay, and there's our character. I'm not going to worry about the blue guy for now. All right, and so what we're going to do is just take this green and you can do this and just create a faint subtle fog. Now, if it looks too much, if it looks too much, what you can do is you can reduce it to almost nothing. And then you can do a black one like this. Okay. So we have nice separation there. So really all we're looking at is a quad

that looks like this. That's basically it. Um and you just put that you attach it to the camera. But also you could go ahead go to the foreground and add another layer of vignette. And create more separation behind the player this is where the separation really gets um useful. And this is the classic Hollow Knight foreground separate or the ground separation. Helps the player know what they can jump on, right? Now this is pretty aggressive. The vignette's pretty aggressive so we could obviously reduce things. And you really got to play with these values cuz I mean it can get really muddy really fast. Let's see if we can crank that up a little bit. Just create some separation here.

You could probably remove the center of it so there's more contrast there, yeah. And then one final thing that Hollow Knight does really well Hollow Knight does really well is the ground layer is always sort of complemented by sparse highlights. So it's just something to consider to help me see better. So we'll just do can even make it white and then just set it to an overlay filter. Right? Something like that. If you set this to overlay, it might

even help. Let's see. Go a little bit brighter. No. Set it to normal. Maybe crank up the saturation of that. Yeah. Just playing with some values here. Yeah. It's something like this. It doesn't look great, I'll be honest with you, but it's something like this where you add a quad beneath the foreground and just add some separation. Cuz right now, if we duplicate it and bring it to the top, it's just hard to see where I could jump. And if you blur it, you can really see kind of the problem here. It's all kind of the same color.

Do you see why why we're doing this? Does that make sense, guys? Um you could even crank up the contrast of the ground. Right? Crank that up, and now we have rock solid separation. And it's just done by creating contrast between the layers. So, this is what we had. It looks beautiful, of course, but it's just hard to see. The separation is hard. Does that make sense, guys?
Yeah. It's okay to It's okay to take influence from other games. I got no issue with that. Um and then obviously the UI here would the crisp UI UI here is going to help, you know, elevate this

even more. So, you'd have your UI here. Um you'd have your Yeah, so that's what I would do. That's how I would approach it. Um obviously you could add a little bit of a bloom in front of the player like that. But that's what I would do. But I game feels amazing. Game's awesome. Seriously, it's great game. I think it'll probably end it very positive on Steam. Most likely. Assuming the Metroidvania aspects and the bosses and the weapons and the upgrades and the the game is more than let's like 5 hours like a 4 hour 4 or 5 hours of gameplay. Yeah, it'll it'll end up about probably how Constance did. Constance did great and had very clear Hollow Knight influence. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that at all. Um Okay, that was a lot of fun. Okay, so let's go ahead and go ahead and vote really quick, guys. Um let's vote on our favorite game.

So, what were our games? What was your I'm ready I'm creating the poll and it'll be in the chat. What was your favorite game? Okay, we had Explorite. Nemat. Nemat was the Egyptian game. Egyptian horror game. Horror turn-based game. And then uh the uh the last one was or the first one we played was um Escape the red curse. And that was that room game. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and post the poll. The poll's in the chat. I will make a prediction before I watch the I won't look at the poll and I will make a prediction about who's going to win. Before we make the prediction, one final ad read. Summer sale only comes once a year, guys. So, be sure to check out the link below if you want to learn everything I've learned in the last decade of making indie games. The summer sale for my

course, full-time game dev, is 50% off. Join over 4,500 worldwide and learn how to market your game, how to get wish lists, how to hit the Steam front page, how to get a publisher with just a demo and that means go full-time, by the way. How to get funding on Kickstarter. Um how to get wish lists, um how to make a game in 2D or 3D, Unity, Godot, or Unreal. And then I'll also throw in my 3D course, which is brand spanking new. And then also my 2D course. These are 2D and 3D art courses. Um those are completely free, but only for the sale. And then also, hey, I'll throw in my YouTube course, completely free. And then I'll also throw in an hour-long meeting with just me. So, I'll be able to meet you. I'll talk to you personally and we'll have an hour-long call um with a handful of other developers in a private group setting. It'll be a lot of fun. I love having these calls. So, click the link below, check it out and I'll also give you a shout-out just like I did for these new students in tomorrow's live stream. So, uh check it out below. Okay, let's go ahead and make

our prediction on the the the the winning game. I would say that it's going to be tied between those two games, the Egyptian game and the space game. My favorite game was the Egyptian game. I give that game I give it a a very special score because I just think it's just really unique. Like it just it's just obvious it came from somebody's weird warped mind and I love that. But, the space game was awesome. I I thought the room game that we played was it had a ton of potential. I think it was just lacking in the ambience department. So, I'm going to say it's going to be 50/50 between those two games, but I think the Pharaoh game is going to come in second place. Um because I think it's just niche. But let's let's take a look and see. Oh my goodness me.

Look at that. Namahd is a clear winner. That's awesome. And I say that's awesome because I like seeing games that are super duper unique um being successful. So, to the developer of Namahd and Explorite and Escape the Red Curse, everybody finish your games. In particular, Namahd, I think you do have something special. It The game feels a little rigid and a little it didn't feel great to play if I'm being honest, but I loved just the vibe and the art. So, you did a great job. Okay, guys, I love you. Take it easy. I'll see you tomorrow. And by the way, if you're a student of mine and you're in the full-time game dev program, leave a message in the chat about what you think about the program. And if you do enroll, guys, I'll give you a a shout-out in tomorrow's live stream. I