This was quite a tricky video to make. In part because the distortions and parallax in games are fairly understated (which they should be), but this makes it difficult to showcase in a video like this. Hopefully it all made sense. I also made a few simplifications and skipped details here and there, but I largely did this in order to explain one concept at a time (a lot of the games in question use all of these tricks almost all of the time) As usual I don't use examples in order to bash on specific games, I really like Laika and Gris and their art styles, and having a game that looks flat isn't necessarily a problem, A game like Tails of iron almost makes that paper-like feel a feature of the game :) Ohh, and we could argue that a developer might be blurring foreground assets in order to mimic depth of field of a camera, but why a game does something doesn't really matter, the fact is that blurry silhouettes often look significantly less flat compared to sharp assets with a lot of contrast.
@12feetup Ye, it's a tricky balance. I would say that my videos are perhaps not the best way to approach it. I lean quite heavy into the 'edutainment' side of things, that is I showcase the idea, but skip all details for the sake of brevity (which is why my videos are 8 minutes long and not 50 minutes long). But if you are doing a legitimate tutorial on how to use an add-on, there might be a need to not skip the details, the details might be vital. It would make the video less entertaining to watch, but more useful for the user (assuming they do watch it all). I guess this all depends on whether you want to treat the video as documentation or as 'marketing'
@12feetup hmm, I feel like people sometimes disparage getting ’views’ as a sort of ’evil’ way to get money. But as someone who does buy courses and reads stuff that is purely educational, that stuff is annoying and boring to engage with, I often don’t have the energy to watch it. I am much more likely to try and watch something that gives me ideas, inspiration yet is kind of fun and engaging. The reason I lean into brevity is not because I don’t want to be useful, it’s that whenever I add a lot of context and nuance, people click away and stop watching. This obviously to some extent means that you at times cut too much and make people annoyed, and sometimes cut too little and leave people bored by your content (and if they are bored, they don’t find your stuff useful and they leave). So personally I feel that even if ”information” is your #1 goal, it can depending on the medium be so heavily influenced by entertainment that if you don’t take into account what captures peoples attention, you might actually make your content less informational by ignoring entertainment. It all kind of depends on the context and is in general a difficult question to navigate. Good luck :)
@@nemo9396 Ye, but as I talked about in the video on "why showing the sky is a mistake". I think dealing with vertical scrolling with a normal horizon is frankly incredibly difficult to deal with. I frankly don't know if I have too many good solutions for it.
just want to say thanks very much for the concise and helpful video, your content is expertly filling a sorely-needed niche for game devs (especially non-artists). I look forward to your future content and game
Besides parallax -Use normal maps to create 3D looking lighting in 2D. -Utilizing blurring to something far away or really close to the camera, is also useful.
Your meticulous analysis is amazing, and I've learned so much from your videos! In my book, you are one of the top gamedev RUclipsrs out there and I am incredibly grateful you take the time to make these videos!!
Really awesome video. This is a gold-mine of practical techniques, and I love when you break down the techniques used by other games and then implement them in your own game to show the effects of said technique. Just seeing side-by-sides of some of these things is so eye-opening. When I make scenes in games, I'll often feel like something is *off* but I can't tell what it is. Seeing everything laid out like this makes me realize how much I fail to notice when just playing these games.
One of the challenges of getting depth is getting consistent and believeable lighting when drawing 3d shaped sprites. Especially when flipping and rotating assets
Yes, I basically mention that conclusion at the end of the video. There are a lot of 'solutions' that in some regards I wouldn't personally consider worth it, and leaning into your game looking kind of flat might be a better approach depending on the style you are going for, but I still think it's worthwhile to consider some approaches that are out there.
Great video! I’ve come to the same conclusions over the last years of studying 2d games and working in my indie metroidvania project! The path we took to get uniqueness is inspired by anime gouache bg art style and composition in Unity taking some ideas from games like rayman and hollow knight, adding my take in how to solve it according blur and painting less detailed art for bg and fg
I'm no game dev but i religiously watch your videos. Art and especially video games are so interesting, even though i posses 0 skills in the field. I got an environmental chemistry degree but sometimes i sort of regret that because art seems so much more fun. If i would win a large sum of money I'd switch carreers because then i can take the risk but right now I'll stick to my (boring) lane
I don't really mention it in any videos but my background is also in STEM, I still just do gamedev/gameart as a hobby on the side. I'm generally quite happy having gone into STEM, less of a risk (as you said), and you gain a lot of fairly interesting knowledge (compared to arts xD). So In terms of my videos this generally means I don't sit with any industry knowledge (except as second hand information from gdcs, articles or books), but I try to back every argument with my own art to show that all principles I talk about hold up.
@@Nonsensical2D you are very multitalented then, you should be proud! You worked hard for your STEM knowledge as well as your art skills. I respect that a lot! I may sound a bit too sour regarding science. It fit my persona very well and i enjoyed my studies. But nowadays i feel like i have some unreleased creativity within me that's trapped. It's just some ideas and stuff, but i wish i could release it. I suppose i could, given enough time and effort but it's a very monumental task to start from scratch.
I think it seems like more of a monumental task than you have to make it. I haven't really "tried to get good", I'm just interested in the stuff and do it a lot. Eventually you get better. It's obviously tricky to find the time though (which is why I on occasion go months without releasing anything), but such is life in a way, gotta take the good with the bad :)
@@Nonsensical2D yea true, time is indeed the major constraint. I'm building a house with my parents so not much free time. i suppose i could see the house as a sort of creation 😊
Your channel is bringing new knowledge to us or atleast me and I really like it. You explain things clearly and focus on 2D art which is great. I really enjoy your videos, thank you
4:20 personally, i think this readability issue _can_ be reduced with good consistency, as the player will intuit that the part of the floor they interact with is roughly down the middle. As long as we make the foreground and background edges of the platform clear, the player can reliably predict where that centerline is It IS more difficult, mind you, so it's still not ideal for a high precision platfotmer, but it's still possible to give enough information for a level of precision more along lines of Mario, where you have a bit more "weight" to your movement, and the platforms are accordingly made more generous. Alternatively, the ambiguity is a bit less dangerous if the player has a lot of options for aerial mobility or "snapping" to platform edges
I have been taking art classes for the last year, and your videos really help translate these new skills into game design. Thank you for making them! Do you have any games currently in development right now?
You keep mentioning throughout the video the word "distort". How should the art be distorted in the mentioned cases: blurred, translated (moved) faster/slower or something else?
Hmm, what I mean is that in reality the object would "distort" in some way or another, either through parallax or rotation. What we are trying to do in 2D is either replicating the distortion or hiding the distortion. Parallax is replicating distortion by creating layers of depth, blur in contrast is hiding the distortion, since it is blurry, it is less obvious that the object looks like a flat sprite as you move. If you add a movement shader I would say that it kind of hides the flatness, but it does so by mimicking distortion, a flat sprite doesn't look as flat when it isn't behaving as a flat sprite. Overall, some of these changes make quite minimal differences and thus might not be worth it, but if you feel that your scenario looks too flat, I would look into one of the methods and just try to see if it improves anything.
2D Game Art should look Flat (Lets say like in Top Gear (SNES). Like the perfect 2.5D Game should look like too. You only see 3D in 2.5 because its difficult to do. Clay Fighter is the Perfect Counter Argument. Because its 3D(Real Slow Motion) inside a 3D (non Flat) Enviroment.
I don't know so much about it but I think you have to improve a little bit the color in general in your game, look great but something is not working well
I'll probably play around with it a bit more, but this scene was just created for the purpose of talking about something in my previous video, so I haven't sat with it that much, I think you are right though that it could use some tuning :)
The left one in this case was built on 5~ish different parallax layers, and so when I move sideways it doesnt look as flat as the one to the right. Doing this adds depth, but at the cost of performance of time (I generally dont think its worth overdoing it). The individual sprites dont distort in that case though (which you could also add with a shader)
I mention this point later in the video. The original ori does as far as I can tell only use 2D rendered sprites that originate from 3D assets, there is a whole gdc on discussing the animations (this changes a bit with wotw which does seem to have 3D assets in the actual game, but the scene showcased here is from blind forest). Since the character Ori isn't 3D in the game, it actually kind of becomes relevant for a video like this. Nonetheless, all of the points I bring up regarding Ori are relevant for a completely hand drawn 2d game as well.
This was quite a tricky video to make. In part because the distortions and parallax in games are fairly understated (which they should be), but this makes it difficult to showcase in a video like this. Hopefully it all made sense. I also made a few simplifications and skipped details here and there, but I largely did this in order to explain one concept at a time (a lot of the games in question use all of these tricks almost all of the time)
As usual I don't use examples in order to bash on specific games, I really like Laika and Gris and their art styles, and having a game that looks flat isn't necessarily a problem, A game like Tails of iron almost makes that paper-like feel a feature of the game :)
Ohh, and we could argue that a developer might be blurring foreground assets in order to mimic depth of field of a camera, but why a game does something doesn't really matter, the fact is that blurry silhouettes often look significantly less flat compared to sharp assets with a lot of contrast.
@12feetup Ye, it's a tricky balance. I would say that my videos are perhaps not the best way to approach it. I lean quite heavy into the 'edutainment' side of things, that is I showcase the idea, but skip all details for the sake of brevity (which is why my videos are 8 minutes long and not 50 minutes long). But if you are doing a legitimate tutorial on how to use an add-on, there might be a need to not skip the details, the details might be vital. It would make the video less entertaining to watch, but more useful for the user (assuming they do watch it all).
I guess this all depends on whether you want to treat the video as documentation or as 'marketing'
@12feetup hmm, I feel like people sometimes disparage getting ’views’ as a sort of ’evil’ way to get money. But as someone who does buy courses and reads stuff that is purely educational, that stuff is annoying and boring to engage with, I often don’t have the energy to watch it. I am much more likely to try and watch something that gives me ideas, inspiration yet is kind of fun and engaging.
The reason I lean into brevity is not because I don’t want to be useful, it’s that whenever I add a lot of context and nuance, people click away and stop watching. This obviously to some extent means that you at times cut too much and make people annoyed, and sometimes cut too little and leave people bored by your content (and if they are bored, they don’t find your stuff useful and they leave).
So personally I feel that even if ”information” is your #1 goal, it can depending on the medium be so heavily influenced by entertainment that if you don’t take into account what captures peoples attention, you might actually make your content less informational by ignoring entertainment. It all kind of depends on the context and is in general a difficult question to navigate. Good luck :)
It would be cool to have a video about vertical parallax like when a character goes up into flight mode.
@@nemo9396 Ye, but as I talked about in the video on "why showing the sky is a mistake". I think dealing with vertical scrolling with a normal horizon is frankly incredibly difficult to deal with. I frankly don't know if I have too many good solutions for it.
Half visual art, half psychology, and a sprinkle of design thrown in there. Nice.
just want to say thanks very much for the concise and helpful video, your content is expertly filling a sorely-needed niche for game devs (especially non-artists). I look forward to your future content and game
Great video! Thanks nerdy Ryan Gosling!
Besides parallax
-Use normal maps to create 3D looking lighting in 2D.
-Utilizing blurring to something far away or really close to the camera, is also useful.
Your meticulous analysis is amazing, and I've learned so much from your videos! In my book, you are one of the top gamedev RUclipsrs out there and I am incredibly grateful you take the time to make these videos!!
This is explained really well! Thanks for being clear and concise.
Really awesome video. This is a gold-mine of practical techniques, and I love when you break down the techniques used by other games and then implement them in your own game to show the effects of said technique. Just seeing side-by-sides of some of these things is so eye-opening. When I make scenes in games, I'll often feel like something is *off* but I can't tell what it is. Seeing everything laid out like this makes me realize how much I fail to notice when just playing these games.
These videos are really great for absolute non-artists like me. Invaluable knowledge in a short and concise manner. Thank you!
One of the challenges of getting depth is getting consistent and believeable lighting when drawing 3d shaped sprites. Especially when flipping and rotating assets
love how this video was just content. didn't start with a three minute "hey guys, video games have come a long way from tetris--"
I don’t think looking flat is a bad thing tho, gris looks amazing and some other games you showed are stunning even with flat assets
Yes, I basically mention that conclusion at the end of the video. There are a lot of 'solutions' that in some regards I wouldn't personally consider worth it, and leaning into your game looking kind of flat might be a better approach depending on the style you are going for, but I still think it's worthwhile to consider some approaches that are out there.
@@Nonsensical2D yeah mb lol, i commented half way through watching
So many cool effects that I have *not* been thinking about!
Great video from a great channel. Thanks for all the wonderful art analysis.
Great video! I’ve come to the same conclusions over the last years of studying 2d games and working in my indie metroidvania project! The path we took to get uniqueness is inspired by anime gouache bg art style and composition in Unity taking some ideas from games like rayman and hollow knight, adding my take in how to solve it according blur and painting less detailed art for bg and fg
I'm no game dev but i religiously watch your videos. Art and especially video games are so interesting, even though i posses 0 skills in the field. I got an environmental chemistry degree but sometimes i sort of regret that because art seems so much more fun. If i would win a large sum of money I'd switch carreers because then i can take the risk but right now I'll stick to my (boring) lane
I don't really mention it in any videos but my background is also in STEM, I still just do gamedev/gameart as a hobby on the side. I'm generally quite happy having gone into STEM, less of a risk (as you said), and you gain a lot of fairly interesting knowledge (compared to arts xD). So In terms of my videos this generally means I don't sit with any industry knowledge (except as second hand information from gdcs, articles or books), but I try to back every argument with my own art to show that all principles I talk about hold up.
@@Nonsensical2D you are very multitalented then, you should be proud! You worked hard for your STEM knowledge as well as your art skills. I respect that a lot!
I may sound a bit too sour regarding science. It fit my persona very well and i enjoyed my studies. But nowadays i feel like i have some unreleased creativity within me that's trapped.
It's just some ideas and stuff, but i wish i could release it. I suppose i could, given enough time and effort but it's a very monumental task to start from scratch.
I think it seems like more of a monumental task than you have to make it. I haven't really "tried to get good", I'm just interested in the stuff and do it a lot. Eventually you get better. It's obviously tricky to find the time though (which is why I on occasion go months without releasing anything), but such is life in a way, gotta take the good with the bad :)
@@Nonsensical2D yea true, time is indeed the major constraint. I'm building a house with my parents so not much free time. i suppose i could see the house as a sort of creation 😊
Your channel is bringing new knowledge to us or atleast me and I really like it. You explain things clearly and focus on 2D art which is great. I really enjoy your videos, thank you
Great analysis in the little details that makes a game great!
Man, your videos are super useful. Petfect timing too
4:20 personally, i think this readability issue _can_ be reduced with good consistency, as the player will intuit that the part of the floor they interact with is roughly down the middle. As long as we make the foreground and background edges of the platform clear, the player can reliably predict where that centerline is
It IS more difficult, mind you, so it's still not ideal for a high precision platfotmer, but it's still possible to give enough information for a level of precision more along lines of Mario, where you have a bit more "weight" to your movement, and the platforms are accordingly made more generous. Alternatively, the ambiguity is a bit less dangerous if the player has a lot of options for aerial mobility or "snapping" to platform edges
Most consistent rant devlogger🙏🙏🙏
My fav. Awesome. Thanks!
I have been taking art classes for the last year, and your videos really help translate these new skills into game design. Thank you for making them! Do you have any games currently in development right now?
Thanks! yes, but nothing on with a steam store or a name (for now) :)
I love how the trees disappear when the view gets too close.
Please do a video on how to make a 2d tilemap .
Ye, that is definitely a planned video :)
Thanks, really helpful
Nice Work Brother :D
You keep mentioning throughout the video the word "distort". How should the art be distorted in the mentioned cases: blurred, translated (moved) faster/slower or something else?
Hmm, what I mean is that in reality the object would "distort" in some way or another, either through parallax or rotation. What we are trying to do in 2D is either replicating the distortion or hiding the distortion. Parallax is replicating distortion by creating layers of depth, blur in contrast is hiding the distortion, since it is blurry, it is less obvious that the object looks like a flat sprite as you move.
If you add a movement shader I would say that it kind of hides the flatness, but it does so by mimicking distortion, a flat sprite doesn't look as flat when it isn't behaving as a flat sprite. Overall, some of these changes make quite minimal differences and thus might not be worth it, but if you feel that your scenario looks too flat, I would look into one of the methods and just try to see if it improves anything.
thanks, always valuable information
This is an awesome video!!!
Awesome! Thanks!
Wow this is helpful!!
Thanks man
Hey! What brush do you use for outlines on Procreate?
Depends on the scene, but it is basically either Inka or Syrup. Both belong to the base set.
Thanks! Your videos are great!
2D Game Art should look Flat (Lets say like in Top Gear (SNES). Like the perfect 2.5D Game should look like too. You only see 3D in 2.5 because its difficult to do. Clay Fighter is the Perfect Counter Argument. Because its 3D(Real Slow Motion) inside a 3D (non Flat) Enviroment.
I don't know so much about it but I think you have to improve a little bit the color in general in your game, look great but something is not working well
I'll probably play around with it a bit more, but this scene was just created for the purpose of talking about something in my previous video, so I haven't sat with it that much, I think you are right though that it could use some tuning :)
With the two bushes where the left 'distorts', I don't see that? How do you notice the distortion? Thanks for your (always) informative video's!
The left one in this case was built on 5~ish different parallax layers, and so when I move sideways it doesnt look as flat as the one to the right. Doing this adds depth, but at the cost of performance of time (I generally dont think its worth overdoing it). The individual sprites dont distort in that case though (which you could also add with a shader)
0:02 Ori is a bad example because Ori uses a ton of 3D assets
I mention this point later in the video. The original ori does as far as I can tell only use 2D rendered sprites that originate from 3D assets, there is a whole gdc on discussing the animations (this changes a bit with wotw which does seem to have 3D assets in the actual game, but the scene showcased here is from blind forest). Since the character Ori isn't 3D in the game, it actually kind of becomes relevant for a video like this. Nonetheless, all of the points I bring up regarding Ori are relevant for a completely hand drawn 2d game as well.
Great advices 👍🏻 Subscribed
lack of shading, lights and depth
Top maN!
cuz it do be 2d
das y
Easy answer: scene depth
commenting to be the 69th comment, noice