Webinar: Make Your Game Art Look 10X Better With This Trick!

212. How you doing? It's been a while since I've live streamed, guys. And I'm very, very, very excited. Um, come on in. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We're going to just take a look at what I'm going to call, what did I end up calling it? It's called the Fabulous Five. Okay, I had to come up with some name. It's called the Fabulous Five. And it's five things that are crucial, absolutely crucial for your game art to look like professional game art to look great. Okay? It's going to make your game hopefully look 10 times better. Here's the thing. Even if you're using AI art, hey Karen, how you doing? Cross, how you doing? Even if you're using AI art, which I don't want you to, I really don't. mainly because I want you to be creative with your own two hands, but also I want you to own the IP for your artwork. But even if for some reason you decided to use AI art, these

five things still work because you're going to end up well doing these things anyway for even AI art. I don't want you to use AI art. How many times do I have to say that? But still, but still, it could work even with AI. So, this is going to help you a ton. So, let's jump in to this workshop, and I want to show you guys exactly what these fabulous five are. Before we do that, I want to say a huge thank you to new students who've joined either full-time gamedev or my 2D art programs or my 3D art programs. Um, Albaode, Lauren, Gy, I'm I'm trying. I'm so sorry. Armen and TK, welcome to the program. And look guys, I actually started just launched this uh sale today for 2D Art Pro. It's a 7-day sale sort of in celebration of Labor Day. Um 7-day sale to join and get 25% off 2D Art Pro. The biggest part, the

best part about this sale is that you're also going to get my 3D art program completely free. So, if you want to master 2D art um for your games, you want to learn from an actual Time magazine featured game artist, that's me, uh you're going to get 25% off my 2D art program, but you're also going to get 3D art pro, which is my 3D art program, completely free. It's good to know both. Okay? It's good to know 2D art if you want to make a 3D game. It's also good to know 3D art if you're making a 2D game because you can actually take advantage of 3D art skills and bring them into your 2D game. but also you may eventually make a 3D art a 3D game as well. So check it out below. See if it's something you're interested in. You're going to learn character art. You're going to learn landscapes. You're going to learn enemies, objects. You're going to learn different styles. And you're also going to get my color uh my color theory workbooks. You're going to get my brushes. So check it out below. There's six days left and there's only 50 seats available. Um see if it's something you're interested in. Anyways,

let's go ahead and open up Photoshop and get started on this workshop. Okie dokie. Ally Golden Apples, come on in. Come on in. All right, so the first thing I want to show you guys here. I'm like really addicted to Gatorade lately. The first thing I want to show you guys is I've got a very simple scene here, okay, in Photoshop. And I'm just using a simple mouse here. Okay. And I just want to sort of show you guys the fabulous five the five different things that we can do to this artwork that I want you guys to understand for your own artwork. And you don't have to be super talented. And these five things are composition, depth, scale, color theory, edge detailing. What is that? I'll show you in a sec. And then lighting. Okay, these five things.

That's six things. So, we're going to call it the fabulous six. 1 2 3 4 five six. We're going to call it the fabulous six. Why not? Let's start with composition. Okay. Uh and composition is important even if your camera's moving, which your camera is going to be moving. But let me just show you really quickly here. These are hills. These are this is our character and this is the foreground. Often times I see game developers sort of putting things everything is separated evenly in in a shot. Okay. And this by the way this this makes sense for 2D and 3D. Even with 3D games, how you arrange furniture, how you arrange windows on an interior shot. Game developers, for some reason, if they're not like well-versed in artwork, they tend to make everything evenly distributed and not grouped. And that's that that is not how the real world works, especially in nature. Things are smooshed together

and grouped. Okay, so here's what I mean. Everything's sort of evenly distributed here. Okay, the mountains are sort of even. The the um clouds, I can't think of the word. the clouds are even. But what we want to do is actually create some uh um some grouping and moving things closer together and smooshing things. Okay? So, for example, I can bring this down here, down here, and down here. All of a sudden, it looks way better. Okay, this foreground element here, we can move it forward up closer to the camera. Or we could do this. So all of a sudden it looks 10 times better. I can do this right here. Let's say I've got big clouds here. I'm going to do small clouds higher up. Let's duplicate this one and do something like this. So how you arrange your elements in a 2D or a 3D scene are insanely important.

Okay. Um how you co uh compose your shot is insanely important. Now notice where the character is. Okay. Now you can't control where the character is at at all times, but in 2D games, what I like to do is try and put him in the lower third somewhere here. Okay, so that's composition. Okay, this is also true in 3D as well. We're not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of 3D, but I'm going to draw out kind of what I mean. Okay. So, in 3D, if you're in a firstperson uh shooter, for example, and let's say this is the top view of a interior shot or interior level. Okay. What a lot of developers will do is they'll put a chair here. They'll put a bench here. They'll put a

um bookshelf here. They'll put a light here. a light here, a light here, they'll put a rug here, they'll put a plant here. It feels really disorienting. And it makes my skin crawl if I'm being completely If I'm being completely honest, it feels What's that? What's that fear of holes? Um, phobia. It's like that. It looks too even. It actually looks wrong when everything is evenly dist distributed. Okay. In this case though with a top down shot like this, if I was arranging furniture, I would put a chair here, a vase here, a bookshelf here. Okay. A light. And actually less is more with lighting. I'll do a whole other workshop with when it comes to 3D

lighting. um one light here that casts light like this. So, it's actually creating a imbalance to create a little bit more um visual uh a dynamic visual. And so the same is true with this here. Okay, I'm actually smooshing things together, but it looks much better. Okay. So that is composition. Okay. Composition of our shot is super duper important. Now let's move on to the second thing. Depth. Okay. Depth is achieved with two things. All right. Even in 2D art or 3D. Depth is achieved with two main things. Atmospheric fog and scale. Okay. Or or size. We're going to say size because scale is number three and that's a different thing.

It's things getting smaller and smaller as they get away from the camera. Okay. So, let's start. Let's just start with atmospheric fog. Now, atmospheric fog can be achieved in two different ways. You can use actual uh coloring of sprites like I'm going to do here. But also, atmospheric fog can be achieved with using the fog uh in the lighting tab in Unity. Um, in 2D you have to have like a custom shader to do that. So, we're going to do it by hand here in Photoshop just to show you. Okay, so watch how quickly our our artwork is going to look 10 times better. Okay, we're just going to start slowly now. Clouds, we're going to start slowly going darker and darker as we get towards the camera. Okay, it's going to simulate fog. However, clouds are different. Okay, clouds are different. So, I'm going to go full white with clouds. Bear with me for just a second here. We're going to do white here, white

here, and white here. Okay. But everything else, what we're going to do is as we come towards the camera, we're just going to go darker and darker and darker and darker and darker. Isn't that crazy? Look how much better this looks than when we first started. And if you're if you're unsure, let's go ahead and take a look at the preview. I'm going to open up my live stream here and we're going to take a look at how it started. Okay. So, let me pull it up here and take a look at our live stream. And we'll go back in time here and take a look at what I was working with. Right. Um, give me just a sec here. Thomas, why are you watching ads? So,

right here. This is what we started with. Okay. And I'll actually screenshot this. So, this is what we had and this is what we've got. Guys, I haven't changed the shapes at all. All right. Um I haven't I haven't changed the shapes at all. I've changed the composition and I've also changed the depth. Now, we can also change depth by using scale. Okay. So, I can take this scale it even more. What you might want to do to simulate a little bit more depth here is actually just change the opacity so it's really sort of fading out into the distance. Right? I could do it here as well with these clouds. And I could go really big here with one more like this.

Right. Let's do a color overlay and just make this white just to show you. Drop this down a little bit and this down as well. But that's the idea, guys. Using scale to create more depth. Okay. But we'll we'll talk about scale a little bit more when we start to add some detailing to this image. All right. So that's scale. I'm sorry. That is size. Sorry, I I I I'm um using the wrong word there. So depth is achieved with the size of objects. As they get further and further away from the camera, they get smaller, but also they blend into the sky due to atmospheric fog. Okay, make sense so far? So far, it is better. So far, we're on the right track. Now, to make your image look 10 times better,

we're going to talk about Journey. Okay, let's look at Journey really quick. If we take a look at a screenshot from Journey, Journey is like the uh uh the quintessential screenshot for what I'm trying to say about size or scale. Okay. So, if we take a look at the game journey, look at what scale does for us. Okay, the characters tiny relative to the environment. Okay, this is what makes this game so exciting. The world just seems so big. Okay, so you can use scale to your advantage with your game art. Okay, now this is not always the case. You don't always like especially if your game is more realistic, but if you're making an indie game with sort of stylized graphics, take advantage of scale. It's a it's a it's a great hack uh to make your game

look really interesting. So, if I open up Photoshop here, you can see this is my character, right? It's just a little pill shape. If I drop him down and make him much smaller, suddenly the world is a little bit more exciting, a little bit more interesting. Again, that's what he was. But if we just drop him down to this, I personally feel way more interested in this image. Now, when we start adding detailing and doing some polishing to this image, hopefully this idea of scale will make more sense. But right now, all I'm going to do is just shrink the size of our character. Okay, that's it. Okay. Alrighty. Let's keep going here. Color theory. Now, this is where we're going to spend a good amount of our time. Okay, guys. Color theory. Now, I'm

going to just go ahead and talk really quickly about complimentary color theory because complimentary color theory is my favorite color theory. Um, because there's multiple kinds. There's like triadic. Um, in fact, let's just go ahead and take a look here. Okay, type in color theory on Google images. And you don't need Thomas to tell you exactly what to do. Just Google it. We've got complimentary, we've got analogous. Actually, I'll just do this here because that that chat's in the way. Analogous, triadic, split, complimentary, and tetratic. Okay, so that's like five different color theories, although there's a ton of different color theories. We can use complimentary color theory or I mean maybe we could even use triadic here. I actually like triadic. We can use triadic to pick various colors and decide what are our three triadic

colors. That'll be the I don't know the focus of the scene. Limitation generates beauty. It tends to do that. So when you limit yourself with certain colors, all of a sudden things look a little bit more beautiful. Don't ask me why. I don't know the scientific reason, but that's just the case. So let's limit oursel with triadic color. Let's choose a teal. Let's ch choose a reddish purple and a vibrant yellow as our three colors. Okay. So I'm going to think, okay, well, what could the sk the sky color be? Well, we said teal. Okay, so the triadic color theory would be teal and then orange. Right. Let's take a look here. We've got teal. We've got orange. Actually, it would be

that purple. It would be more of a purplish red. I'm so sorry. So, it' be this purplish red here. Good. And then a little bit of a yellow. Okay. There we go. Right. So that could be our colors that we choose. But let's think here. Let's be a little bit more creative. Let's take a look and see some other theories we could use. I actually really like um I I I want to I want to stick to complimentary here. Okay. This teal and orange is kind of what I want. All right. and I will answer questions. I will. I promise we're going to do a Q&A after this. Okay? So, everybody hang tight. We're just going to talk really quickly here about color theory and then I'll answer

questions at the end. Okay? So, let's go ahead and pick our colors here. We're going to do an orange and then we're going to do this teal. Teal and orange, baby. There we go. I'm going to make that look a little bit more red. So, I'm going to kind of eyeball this here, but we're using color theory for sure, especially complimentary color theory. Okay, so there's our two colors, right? So, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to create a gradient here. And I apologize if some of you watching already know this trick, but I'm going to take this orange here and I'm just going to put a gradient of this and create two different gradients. Okay. Then, this is my favorite thing to do. I love this trick. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go darker on the way down. And this will make sense, I promise. Okay.

So, this right here, these are the colors that I'm going to use. Now, one final thing I want to do here is I'm going to add a hue saturation shift on top of this. Okay. And I'm going to desaturate, but I'm only going to desaturate the left side. There we go. So, we're going to go from this color here all the way to this color over here. I promise this will make sense. Hang tight. Hang tight. So, this is our color palette for this level. Okay. Pretty straightforward. That's our color palette. So, let's go ahead and start with our sky here and start filling in our sky color. Okay, the clouds are fine because those

are just white. Now, I feel like that might be a little too saturated. So, what I'm going to do here is desaturate the sky a little bit more in our color palette. Drop it down like that. Good. And then again, there we go. So, we're going to be going from a blue, a desaturated blue sky all the way to a vibrant orange foreground. Okay. So, let's go ahead and pick colors. The way I'm going to pick colors, and this you might have to rewatch this again to fully understand this because it might be confusing to you. I'm going to start here. Okay? And I'm going to pick colors like this. Okay. So, hang tight, guys. I'm going to keep that line there so you know what I'm talking about. All right. So, I'm going to pick this color here. That's my sky. And as we come forward,

I'm going to slowly fill in the ground. So, we're going to come forward like this. Good. We're going to come forward like this. Good. We're going to come forward like this. Good. Come forward like this. Good. And then come forward like this. About like that. Okay. Alrighty. So, there is our colors. Okay. Now, it doesn't look perfect. That's okay. But we've got a general idea of the colors of our world. Okay. It's sort of a gradient. If we zoom out, it's almost a gradient from blue to orange. All right. Okay. So far so good. I think what we can do here is add one more layer of

depth here and go dark. There we go. Brilliant. I like it. All right. So that is our color theory. Now to review what we did with color theory was we picked two complimentary colors created a gradient between the two and then went darker. So as we go from one color to the other we go darker and darker and darker. Okay. So that's what we're doing with our color theory. And you could pretty much do that all the time with all these different color theories with triadic with complimentary I'll pull those up here with analogous with split complimentary right it's really up to you all right so far so good next up is edge detailing

And honestly, let's just call it detailing. Okay, I say edge detailing because it's really helpful to go in and just cut the edges. Just adding in details to your edges. I always do this first and then what I'll do is after that I'll go in and add more detailing that isn't associated with the edge. But I always start with the edge first. Okay? So like for example this right here, you start with a very simple abstract shape and then as we're finishing up the coloring, we can go in and start adding detailing. So like this right here. Yeah, there we go. Everything needs to look good in the

abstract first, guys. Sorry, one sec. Sorry. And then uh we slowly add detailing from there. Okay. All right. So, notice how there's no real lighting here. There's no intense details. It's very simple. Everything needs to start simple and look good simple first. And you can add detailing later. If it doesn't look good uh simple, it's not going to look good with details. That's just the rule. Okay. Hey, why don't you use Illustrator? Um if you're using basically vector, well, we're going to add, you know, shading and texture.

We're not designing for print. You can use Illustrator, but Illustrator is primarily good for like print and like UX design. It's not necessarily good for for ill illustrative 2D game art. Hopefully that makes sense. All right. Now, we've added some detailing. We're not going to detail the clouds. They look fine. Um, next step is lighting. Okay. So, we've done detailing. Now it's up to Thomas brush to add some lighting here. Now once we do that, once we go through this layering or these the fabulous six here, then we can go in and start adding polish, which is a whole other phase. Let me go ahead and add that seven polish. And what the polish phase is, and I'll explain it or dive into it after we do the lighting, is the polish phase is your brain going, "Hey, I know what this

is. Hey, I know what this image image is. And your your brain starts to come up with ideas. That's why it's so important to do things in the abstract because when you have it laid out in the abstract, your brain starts to realize what you're making and it comes up with more ideas. And I'll show you how that process works hopefully in real time here. Uh but let's go ahead and go to lighting here. Well, where's the sun, Thomas? Let's go ahead and pick where the sun is. I like the idea of the sun being right here. Okay. There's the sun. Okay, we'll put it right here. Let's put it right there. And I'm going to go ahead and add a big subtle pulse of light right there. Okay. But because that's more of a bloom, because there's a horizon, we're going to do a simple gradient and do a uh

a subtle white glow right there. I'm going to set it to overlay. I kind of want to get rid of that pulse to be honest. I don't love it in this case. Yeah, that looks much better. And we're also going to go a little bit dark at the top. Very subtle. Very, very subtle. Just like that. Set it to overlay and just subtle gradient shift. Okay. We could probably add a little bit of a horizon, additional white for the horizon right here. Just like this. There we go. Very subtle. And we're going to be thinking, okay, how can we use simple gradients to simulate shadows between the mountains? Right? Well, you'd have light spilling over the hills, right? So, I'm gonna go to each layer

here, and I'm actually going to create a shadowed gradient like this. It's very subtle. And for those of you who have watched me do this in past, you know, years ago, my process has not changed much because frankly, it's very simple. Subtle gradient there. Not too much. We want the player to stand out. And that one is pretty good. I think that one's fine. Okay. We're gonna add a little bit of a highlight on the top as well. So again, we're just going to use white. Very subtle here. Set it to overlay. And you can do it that way or you could use an inner shadow um effect. But I'm just going to use it

just like that. Very simple. I'm just using simple gradients here, guys. Set it to overlay. I'm going to use a mask to mask out that portion there. There we go. Okay. All right. Do a little bit of a white here. Set it to overlay. Mask out this portion here. Same is true here. Set it to overlay. You especially want that nice highlight there to know where the player can walk. And frankly, I feel like this should be a little bit darker. So, I'm going to grab this color here and just make that not so evident or or not conflict so much with the ground the player can walk on because we want to know what the player

can walk on. All right, so that looks good. Next up is the polish phase. Right. Right here. Polish. And what's going to happen in the polish phase is we're going to slowly make adjustments and sort of peacemeal go through each one of these randomly. We've got this generic um these generic changes that we've made. Now my brain kind of knows what this image is and now I can go in and tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak. So this is the polish phase. Okay. But having this abstract look is really all I need to get enter the polish phase. So I'm going to go ahead and save this. All right. Call this landscape debum. I'm going to answer all of your questions. Okay. I'm going to answer all of your questions in a Q&A after we wrap up here. All right. Alrighty. So, let's go ahead and merge

all of our layers together. By the way, those of you just joining us, you can check out the 2D course below. If you want to support the channel, support the podcast. There is a 2D course below and also hopefully it supports you. I think it will supports your future uh as you learn 2D art and want to make a beautiful 2D game. So, check it out below. It's 25% off. You're also going to get my 3D art program completely free. So, if you want to learn from somebody who's actually making games and has been, you know, released commercial games, check it out below. You're going to learn from me. And then also, um, one of the guys who worked on Twisted Tower, his name is Felipe. He actually teaches in one of the courses as well and teaches how he does 3D art. So, it's a pretty awesome course. You're going to learn a ton. All right, let's take a look here and see what kind of polish we can add to this. Well, I kind of have an idea of what this is.

I see a warm summer day with bushy trees. So, we're going to grab this. Okay. And we're just going to add some bushy trees. When you start adding detailing like this, you kind of start to realize why things are orange, you say, "Oh, it's atmospheric." Right? Or maybe, "Oh, it's the seasons are changing slowly, right?" So, I'm going to go ahead and actually fill in for the purposes of this video, I'm going to actually fill in all of this to be the same color. And then I'm going to add an inner shadow of that highlight. Okay. Just a white highlight. Set it to overlay. Set the size to be small. There we go. Hang on. Why is it doing that?

Wonder why. Oh, that's why. Thomas, be careful, buddy. Merge these together. And then do an inner shadow. There we go. Awesome. There we go. So far so good. We do the same here, but again, we're going to use those principles that we talked about. We're going to use depth, in particular, size, and we're going to go a little bit smaller here and grab this color here and start filling in just some simple spheres. And you can use all sorts of shapes you want. I'm just going to use spheres here to create some trees. Okay. Again, I'm just going to make that all one color. This color here. Rurize that layer. Do an inner shadow with white. And now we have it's as if

the sun is spilling over. Okay. We don't need it to be super intense. And the same is true here as well. I'm going to just do little tiny circles far in the distance of trees. Let's go ahead and do a color overlay. So, in a way, we're reverting back to that original flat color. Um, just so we can add in these details and then do an inner shadow. Okay, so tiny little details here, guys. Looks like there's big forests in the distance. I like that. Now, obviously, guys, you can go as detailed as you want here, but notice how we're just using simple abstract shapes. And again, if you have simple abstract shapes and it works visually, you can add as many details as you want and it's still going to work. It's generally true. Sometimes you can go a little bit too far with details.

That looks great. I like that. Awesome. All right, let's do an inner shadow here. We're going to just increase that. Decrease the size, the distance. Good. Okay, let's think about some details to add to this grass. Right. Well, let's see here. actually have some brushes that are in the course. In particular, this uh you could download them with the course if you enroll, but we can use these grass um brushes here. They're just basically stamps, you know. But I'm going to go ahead and make this flat again. And I'm just going to go ahead and rasterize that layer style and use this

brush. And I'm just going to add some details here to the grass. And you'll notice it's color. It's varying in color. I'm not going to worry about that right now because we're going to eventually just make it um all one color. Yeah, that looks pretty good. I'm going to do a color overlay. Just like that. Rasterize the layer style. And again, same thing here, but we're going to go a little bit bigger. Just creating some depth. Same here, same color. And now all of a sudden, things are starting to feel like they're actually in a three-dimensional world. And the camera is looking down, right? Just using all these different details to create more depth. Um, let's see here.

Here we go. Same is true for here. Just making it this this brown color here. So now it definitely feels more like autumn, you know. Um, okay. Good, good, good. Now, boom. We've added detailing. Now we can go in and add a little bit more lighting detailing. Okay. So, this is going to be kind of our final pass here for our landscape. We're going to add in subtle details to create more lighting. I didn't want to do this previously when I was first going through these steps because I don't want to add shadows when all of the details of the edges aren't done. Okay. So, for example, I have this here, these bushes. So, now I can go ahead and just add in

subtle shadows. And what you do is you grab this, paste this, and then flip it. It's almost like a reflection. And then I can skew the crap out of it. Right. Like that. I can do a little bit of a motion blur. Go full black and then set it to overlay. So now I have shadows being cast across the landscape about the same angle as where the sun is. Okay, it's pretty straightforward. I can also do something that is pretty interesting. I I I don't know what I would call this,

but this other method here is I'm not copying and pasting anything. I'm actually just sort of eyeballing where I think the shadows might go. So, for example, I could do this and just create some long shadows here with where I might think the shadows are going to cast from these forests in the background. Looks terrible, but that's okay. Hopefully, I'll show you what I mean here. Yep. Okay, let's do a little bit of a motion blur. Set it to overlay. There we go. Very subtle. Do the same thing here. Tiny little shadows here being cast.

All right. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Motion blur. Set it to overlay. Drop it down. Just like that. Make this one a little bit more subtle. There we go. Awesome. Now, with closer elements to the camera, we can add more detailing, more lighting detailing. So, for example, I could go ahead and just add in some subtle pops of highlights here. Just do an overlay. Mask out that portion there. Just subtle. Right. I'm going to convert that to a smart object. and I can just paste them all over the place to create more

detailing. Now, I use this exact method in my game, Never Song. So, it's not um again, this isn't something new for me. This is something I've been using for a long time. So, just sort of eyeball it here. There we go. That one feels a little much. That feels good there. Okay, good. And then let's go ahead and add in some subtle grass texturing. We could do Let's see here. Grab this brush here. We're almost done here. And then I'll answer questions.

Just subtle highlights of grass. Set it to overlay. And then I can use a brush to fade it out. There we go. I can blur this layer here. Good. And then finally, the last thing I like to do is just go ahead and add some mist. Okay. So, just some simple mist. Nothing crazy. Blur. motion blur. So, we're going to motion blur to the right and left at zero. What? There we go.

There we go. And just drop down the opacity. Same is true for here. The mist is also great because it it helps separate layers and the player isn't as confused by what they're looking at. You want nice separation between you and the uh background. Between the player and the background. We definitely need a highlight here. I forgot to add that. Set it to overlay. There we go. Do a pretty sharp one here. And by the way, guys, these principles really do apply for 3D as well. you're just using different tools to accomplish the same thing. Um, you definitely want to I would love I haven't figured this out yet, but I would love to be able to program a shadow that's cast from a two-dimensional character like this.

Guess you could just use 2D lighting. Um, but yeah, something like this would be great to make it feel like it's a evening. All right, so if your background, this is something I always end up doing. If your background feels like it's a little bit too flat, um, like your sky, if it feels a little too flat, you could do one final thing here, and I tend to always do this. I end up adding this final flare. I will add in a little bit of color. to the background like this. So now it feels a little bit more like evening, right? Um I typically I'll shift it to be more pink, but we'll see if that matches. Yep, there we go. That looks really pretty, actually. And you can always add a subtle mist in the sky.

Just a subtle texturing to make it feel a little bit more I don't know what the right word is like modeled so it's not so flat. We'll do a nice motion blur here. I like to do a zero degree motion blur just to make it feel a little bit more subtle or a little bit more realistic. And then just blur it like this. I might squash it a little bit. Let's do the same with these clouds. Let's motion blur these guys. Let's add a little bit of a faint shadow underneath this one. And all you got to do here is just fade it. See? Uh with this one, you can do a little bit of a fade as well. Just make it feel like there's a shadow underneath it. There we go. Same here. There we go.

Same here. Oops. Lock that layer here. There we go. I think that'll do it. Oh, yeah. That's so much better. All right. And then one final thing is to just consider what kind of post-processing you're going to add to your artwork in Unity. I like to do this in Photoshop first. So, the post-processing we might include is um bloom. So, we could do a little bit of a bloom here just to show you what how the effect of that is and how we're going to use it in Unity. Just put it in Photoshop and add a little bit of a glow here. I'm going to set it to overlay and just drop it down a little bit. There we go. So, yeah, that's the idea, guys. That's the idea for our artwork. So, we started with this and this is what we got. Okay, let's bring that up all the way here. There we go. We started with this and this is what we ended up getting. Does that make sense, guys? Does that

make sense? All right, we're going to jump into the Q&A as it pertains to game art or just color theory, making your game look beautiful while we transition into the Q&A and you guys get your questions ready. Again, just one final thank you to Albicode, Lauren, Goa, Armen, and TK. Uh, welcome to um my various programs. Um, by the way guys, if you want to get a shout out tomorrow during my live stream tomorrow, uh, I'll shout you out if you join 2D Art Pro, you're going to get 25% off for the 7-day sale. You're going to master 2D art from an actual time featured magazine artist, that's me, uh, who's released two commercial games in 2D, but also I'm working on a 3D game called Twisted Tower. And I also have a program called 3D Art Pro, which is taught by me and my team member, Filipe, who worked on Twisted Tower. We created this course and it's going to be included completely free if you join in this 7-day sale event. Um, again, 25% off. It's massive. You're going to learn a ton. It's a lot of stuff you've

learned today, but so much more in the course. It supports the channel. It supports the podcast, but also it supports your future. So, check it out below. There's 7 days total for this sale to get 25% off and this free 3D course. So check it out below and join hundreds of students worldwide on their game development journey. All right, let's jump into the Q&A, guys. What kind of questions do we have? Um, am I more of an artist than a programmer? I'm more of an artist, but I am a programmer. All right, what do we got here? Oh, so many questions coming in. Good. Awesome. Um, thank you for asking the questions. By the way, guys, I love getting questions and I want to help as much as I can. Can I put my 2D course on Udemy? No. Udemy takes percentages. This scene looks very Thomas Brush and I believe following the steps would result in similar images. How can one develop their own art style to look original?

Well, here's the thing about the Thomas Brush art style. The Thomas Brush art style is very, very simplistic. Minimalism is kind of my go-to. Um, and so I think that um I think that if someone were to were to take this style here and add a painterly effect or to textured effect to it, it doesn't have to look Thomas brush. Okay. I love symmetry and I love cleanliness and simplicity. Everything's very geometric and circular and flat. This is the base layer. This is the abstract layer. And then you can scale on top of this with your own style, with texture, painterly effects. Um, it doesn't have to be perfect circles. That's kind of the idea. Okay. I'm just giving you the basics here. Okay. Okay. What else we got? What was the first language I learned? English. Um, no. The first language I learned was

AS2. Action script 2. Well actually HTML C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C C CSS and then I learned um AS2 and then I moved on to C#. Uh is it really important to get into it? This is from D div. Is it really important to get into any university for higher studies? I don't think so. I didn't go to gamedev school. Um it it really is hard for me to give advice because you guys all have different personalities than me. I am a self-starter and so I really am. I mean that's my I do pride myself in that. I like to do things my own way and do it on my own time. And so hey Deathcloud, how are you? Dark one Illustration says you develop your own style over time. Just keep at it. Absolutely. You know what I again what I've created here is yes it looks Thomas Brush but what I want you to do is practice these things. Practice composition, depth, scale, color theory, detailing, lighting, and

polish. Practice them, and your own voice will come out as you practice it. And again, if you're going to use AI art, I don't want you to use AI art, but but these all apply still with AI art because you're going to need to cut up the AI art to create a 2D game. And so, you need to understand how to put this stuff into the pieces you're collecting. Again, I don't want you to use AI. I really don't. But if you're going to, they still apply. How do you keep scale right so houses and doors feel natural in the environment and don't look off? Here's the trick. Here's the trick. Scale is so important. scale in 3D games and 2D games is so important and it's always always it's like the um the foil of so many game developers. The way you do it, the way you make sure the scale is right is you think about

practically how big is a house act in actuality. So a lot of people are like okay here's my house. Okay, the question is, is this practical for my character size? Okay, so think about, okay, how tall is a ceiling currently in your house? How tall is a ceiling? Well, I'm 6'3 or 6'2. I'm looking at 8ft ceilings in this in the rental we're at. Um, so a ceiling is like 2 feet taller than me. But what's it normal for a normal What's normal for a a more average height person? Like let's say your average height is in America is like 5'9 or 510. Um that means your your your ceiling size is going to be another uh like 3 feet, right? So in this case our ceiling height is this something like that and that right? But then think

about the width. Is that the typical width of a house? No, it's usually a little bit wider. Okay, so that's kind of how I do things. I think about, okay, what's the size of a real what's the house rel what's the size of a house relative to the to the player, right? And then that is how I determine the size of a house. You do the roof here, right? Something like that. Maybe a little awning here. So that's how I determine the size. Um, I think to if you're going to glean anything from what I just said, it's have your character size set in stone. Well, how do you This is so good. Excuse me. How do you determine how do you determine the size of a character of of a player uh

in your game? What I do is I I I double the size of a primitive object. That's the character height. So the primitive cube, a primitive square or a primitive cube, double that height and that's your character's height. Now you know your character's height relative to the size of a primitive cube. So you sort of start at the very base layer of a Unity Unity primitive cube and you scale from there. That make sense? Yes. This will be saved on the channel. All right. Does separating your art pipelines and coding pipelines work for you? Are you do you need the art to find the fun of your games and know what the systems to make next? Yes. Project Patty for me, and I gotta admit a lot of game

developers I've talked to on the podcast, they say the same thing. Oftent times, the art and the code are dancing with each other and they just dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, and they dance, dance, dance, dance, dance until they become something. So, for me, I know without a shadow of a doubt that this would not be the final form of my game art. I know that it wouldn't because I would code this. I'd put it together and I'd be like, "Ah, that didn't work." Or, "This didn't work." Or the player jumping and the height of the player jump or uh the where my UI is appearing on screen. It's all working together, right? The code and and and the character controller and the particle effects and the music, it all works together. All of these art forms dance together during development. Now, some people I've talked to on the podcast have told me that they do it they could do it iteratively or I'm

sorry, they could do it in pieces. So, it's like, okay, art's done. Now, we're going to move on to code for me. No, I have to I have to play with it all in in a sort of dance, if that makes sense. Does that make sense? I'm not sure if that makes sense. Um, how do you actually choose your color palette? I want to make a police state dystopia game. What would you do for the color palette? Okay, Caleb, great question. What I do is I think about two complimentary colors. The atmosphere, aka like the sky, the horizon, what a distant color of a wall is. And then I also think about the foreground colors, the colors that are closest to the camera. And then I think about the pop of color. So, I I always think about those three things, the atmosphere, the foreground, and the pop. So, dystopian, I'm going to think about, okay, I'm going to choose a a dystopian color

palette. I'm going to think, well, the atmosphere needs to be not aggressive. We're going to do like a purplish gray, right? the foreground elements because it's kind of gonna have a horror vibe to it or sci-fi vibe to it. I'm gonna do like a purple color but more saturated and dark. Maybe shifted a little bit more red. So there's our foreground. And then the pop of color would be the opposite of purple or not the opposite but like a a complement of purple. Something far away on the wheel. So, neon green. So, that's sort of a police state dystopian color palette I might choose. You don't want your atmospheric color, your sky to be aggressive. You want it to be sort of desaturated so that the foreground color and the complimentary color can pop.

Make sense? The art and the code, they dance together. That's right, Patty. Okay, what else we got? Um, what should I do after my high school? I have no idea, Diva. I don't know your personality. If I don't know your personality, I can't really tell you. Um, anything else, guys? Any other questions here? How long should gamedev process take to complete? It'll get it should get faster and faster as you make games. Um, your first game should take a year and it should be a crappy game. I'm just throwing out numbers that I that were true for me. Your second game will take a while because that's sort of your like, okay, I I think I know how to make a good game and I need to go in

there and make this thing really polished. The problem is I don't have a high big budget or a team. So, it's just going to take you a while. But you know what you're you're creating because you f you released that first crappy game. Third game should be uh less time because you've learned what you did wrong with your second game. Um so yeah, it should it should get easier and easier and easier now. But that's easier said than done because I I know for me Twisted Tower is actually taking longer I think than than Never Song took. All right. Did I make my own concept art for Twisted Tower? It's It's a mixed bag. We used AI to help with concepting. It's a great tool for concepting. We just We never used AI for like the final product. No. Um and then also, yeah, with Sketch stuff, so it's kind of a mix. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. uh opinion on making a game solely on

what's popular. I hate that. Not not from a principled perspective, but from a commercially viable perspective. I want you guys to finish your games. And I also want you to make something that stands out and that's unique. The best way to do that is to make something you love. I know that sounds cheesy. It's true. The best way to make something commercially viable is to make something that's unique. And that is your thumbrint and your fingerprint. Especially in the age of AI and friend slop and shovelware and asset flipping, make something that's unique and and it's true to who you are. Making a commercially viable game does not mean you pick the the genre that's popular. That's not what commercial viability means. Commercial viability is making something that people want to buy. And sometimes that means being unique and standing out, making something that uh comes from your heart.

Will we be getting a but it's 2D games? No. No. I I I won't do that anymore. It's too much work. All right, guys. That's all I've got time for today. I hope this was helpful. Feel free to rewatch it, guys. And uh yeah, I love you guys so much. So, so much. That was a lot of fun. And I think that's everything. I'm going to do another uh live stream tomorrow. I might play your games. Um I might uh I might do another art tutorial. What do you guys want to watch? You want to do a let's play your game or do you want to do an art tutorial? So, I'll do one of those tomorrow uh during the live the live stream. Uh, but check out the the sale event um if you want to learn more 2D art and get um go into detail about

characters and color theory and enemies and weapons and um lots of cool stuff with with a 2D course. And then also you get my 3D course for free um where you're going to learn Blender and and how to texture and and how to bring it into Unity and all that good stuff. So check it out below. Get 25% off and 3D art pro free. Um let's play. You guys want to do a let's play tomorrow? All right, sounds good. I think we will