Kind of an odd topic because it superficially doesn't seem to have much to do with drawing, but I see many games that have this type of issue, where their art looks bad even though they can kind of draw somewhat decent assets. Hopefully this video made sense and hopefully the pacing wasn't too slow. Ohh and the video got significantly more delayed than I had hoped, I was originally working on another video but got forced to finish this one first (which made the release delayed), next video will hopefully come next week. Feedback or comments are appreciated as always.
This is where it kind of gets slightly more complicated in a way that I didn't quite want to get into in the video. The topic I am really discussing is composition in many ways, I'm just avoiding using the word. And the problem isn't really necessarily "details" itself, it is rather that when some people add "details" what they are really doing is trying to create a "focal point" (a point that demands attention) in the scene, without knowing that they are doing so. But in Ori, ghost song, gunbrella and many other games, every asset is intricate, but the main focus is still on the scene as a whole, rather than an individual asset, and the artists are very mindful of where their focal points are. I tried touching on this at the end of the video but I think composition is extremely tricky as a subject and a lot of the time I (and experienced artists) don't evaluate whether a scene "works" in the way I describe in the video. What I and many artists do are just go by experience and have a sense for where our eyes look when we look at a game or a painting. And since we have that "intuition", we can also more easily break precisely the "rules" I describe in the video, because we have a sense for when our details are "fine" and when our details aren't "fine". What I am trying to do in this video is to describe the issue in broad strokes, so that a people know to look for it, and kind of start building their own intuition for how to solve it.
@@Nonsensical2D would appreciate a more in-depth video on this topic of composition. You once made a video where you dressed up an area from tilemap to finish. Was one of your best videos imo because seeing it in practice makes it all the more clear
Jonathan Blow had that problem while making Braid. In an interview (or talk) he explained that the first version of graphics after the gray boxing was terrible, even though it looked very pretty. The main point is, like said in the video here, is to focus on how readable the game is. If the background *looks* like it's in the background, the player can quickly discard it. And if things that are important *look* important, they will pay attention. For Braid, I believe the fix was to blur the background slightly, and make it less saturated, and add some stronger outlines to the important elements. It was a while ago since I watched the video regarding it, and it was more about how the game was made in general, but it could be worth having a look at for an example of how to fix detailed graphics. In Ori, they use parallax so that background graphics actually look to be further away, as well as lighting and higher contrast around the terrain. But I also recall that it sometimes was hard to tell at a glance where you can go in Ori. Not often, but there are times where you die because you couldn't read the environment properly. The main point is that the game is easy to "read", that is that you should be able to quickly determine what something is. Ground, or pitfall. Enemy or background. Because a lot of that builds on both psychology (such as people going towards lit up areas subconsciously) as well as "tradition" (such as yellow marking a climbable surface) its one of those things that you can get inspiration from older titles in how to do it.
this is the game designer's version of "Don't just stay zoomed in on your art software, zoom out every so often or just draw zoomed out to avoid spending 5 hours on a blade of grass that is barely visible in the final image" lol
this is jarringly universal advice in a way i dont even think you realized, as a very experienced artist im kicking myself because i feel like this should be obvious but you really made me realize how in _any_ background design this is so important, I'm putting this in the design doc for a _3d animation_ im making, lol. great video holy shit.
@@ColePhoebs There are games that have a lot of detail and it's fine. I think more important is how you handle that detail instead of how much there is. The player character for example shouldn't have less details than the environment, that would be weird. Also readibility is important, you want to bring out the foreground and that's often done with removing contrast from the background, or blurring it, also making it a different color would be fine. Details would still be there though.
I kind of agree with you, which I expanded upon in a reply to my stickied comment. You are right that the problem itself isn't details, instead I would say that beginners sometimes create inadvertent focal points or are bad at handling separation and readability when they make "details". I was aware of this 'misnomer' when making the video, I just wanted to have a simpler way to introduce the topic of composition and readability that a beginner can relate to. My thinking was that a beginner might not be fully aware of the problems that can occur when they "add things and add details", and in that sense I wanted to ease into the topic by mentioning "details", but further down the line actually discuss the real issue with details such as poor handling of value contrast, hue contrast and saturation. Using a 'misnomer' of sorts when making this video might have been a bad choice, but my main attempt when making videos like this is to build the intuition to recognise an issue, rather than get too in depth with 'art language'. With all of this said, I am not always a fan of the idea that you should solve poor composition with "atmospheric perspective" and a blur shader. it works, but I think it is important to actually think about your composition and have decent separation as is. This is in some ways preference I guess, but I think learning to handle and deal with negative space can often help give you better scenes than to just throw on a blur shader and call it a day. But ye, I think your criticism is fair overall, although I do feel it is unfair to call it missing what is important, when I do actually discuss the issue being poor handling of contrast (just as you mentioned).
it's like in painting, photography, or even writing. contrast, or the law of conservation of detail. you can draw attention to a spot by making it brighter or more detailed than everything else. but you can't have everything bright or everything dark and expect that to be coherent or interesting. just like you wouldn't want to read a book about an adventure where the author spends 30 pages talking about the dew on a blade of grass. this is actually related to the yellow paint problem in modern big budget games. high fidelity "realistic" graphics are visually noisy and make it unclear where the gameplay is supposed to happen
What's even worse is that games like RE4 used that perfectly to make navigation more tense and risky, just for them to piss on it with yellow paint in the remake.
"high fidelity "realistic" graphics are visually noisy and make it unclear where the gameplay is supposed to happen" Thank you for putting into words what I've been trying to explain about more detailed graphics for a long time. Sometime around the PS4/XB1 era I noticed some games would have so much going on on the screen it became difficult to read the game so to speak. It takes really skilled artists to make something visually complex but maintain the readability necessary for video games. Sometimes it's not even about where gameplay is supposed to happen it's just visually overwhelming, too much to look at at once. If the artist hasn't delineated where you're supposed to be focusing it all begins to blur together despite the much higher resolution/polygon count.
The "standard bush" version looks more like typical gameplay, while the "flowerbush" feels more like a deliberately empty area for environmental storytelling, like you're about to walk up to a headstone, read the name, and then get absolutely floored by what you just read
Thanks for this!! I'm the artist on a team of devs, and I sometimes have to remind the team (myself included) that more doesn't always mean better. It can be easy to get swept up into details, and forget to compare assets to each other to make sure they all flow nicely. Great visual examples!
Hierarchy of detail is super important and its definitely easy to forget that the game is the final piece when working on individual assets. Very cool video!
I’ve been watching many of your art-related videos, and they’ve really helped me become less 'bad at art' on my current project! One thing I’ve started doing that has saved me time is making incremental changes. I place an asset in my game as soon as possible, even if it looks incomplete, and then iterate on it whenever I see opportunities for improvement. While it does means doing a lot of touch-ups, it still saves me time and helps me avoid overcomplicating things.
Pro tip. To start, only add detail to the areas of your level that the player can interact with. Drawing the player’s eye to non-game assets is distracting. :)
Even though this knowledge is a fundamental in cartooning, which is foundational to most of the art styles shown here, it's very nice to be able to hear this in such a concise and accessible manner. I've been feeling kind of "blehg" about the backgrounds that I've been drawing for a project as of late, and this was very reassuring to watch. You did such a great job at providing examples of problems, and getting the mind to think of solutions to a problem in it's own way while you showed solutions of your own. This was an excellent reason to stay up to midnight tonight, thank you!
I really think pixelart is a good beginner choice. Low res prevents from adding too much detail, use of limited palettes teaches how colors work with each other.
Personally, I just create the scene I want to make in an art program, and then work towards replicating it in the actual game. kinda like concept art. that way, anything that looks bad will get fixed while I'm drawing the concept art, and I'll have that info in mind when I go ahead and start making sprites.
Great video! I think that one important advice I could give to game artists is not to put your assets into a scene when they're done but to draw them in the context of your scene right from the get go. When you draw assets in context (for example in context of a game screenshot or you just start with drawing the background first and then draw everything in front of that like it's all part of one painting), you won't run into the issue where your isolatedly nice asset suddenly looks bad when you put it into your game.
This is something I learnt when I fell into special effects and later visual effects for TV and film. A good art director knows “functional minimalism” and unified colours. A good director knows how to work with the pallet and minimalism. I once created a magic prop for a live TV show. It was an archive cabinet with a hidden small A4 thermal printer mounted in the table underneath and there’s a midden slot in the table top and the archive cabinet that allows us to predict everything. The cabinet I sourced was metal I repainted it and put some ornate handles on it etc. It was metal so it had highlights under the live rotating head lights. The director came onset and pointed out the speculaties highlights and especially when the lights moved and it drew the eyes away (movement pulls people’s attention) and so he asked the prop guys to make a very mundane wooden archive box, no metal details that reflected except for the locks that was required to prove we didn’t get into teh box. And it looked dull, not interesting. And that was exactly the purposes, no suspicion and no disrupting the attention from the mentalist and the celebrity in the act. A lot of composits I did in the beginning I got the suggestion to depth blur assets I competed except for the focus area. It’s fascinating in a rather subjective way.
Thank you so much for making this and your other videos! Your videos about game art composition have been really helpful and informative! As a programmer and not an artist, after watching your videos, I actually have some hope that I might be able to make some basic art for my game that doesn't look too bad.
This is something that is relevant in all fields of art and illustration, honestly. Contrast in detail complexity, colour and light are the base driving forces of what pulls on ✨ Attention ✨ Also relevant in life in general, tbh; If everything is high priority, nothing is high priority. And if everything is high priority, you get stressed trying to deal with everything at once. Figure out what's important and actually needs attention, and what can/should be left on the back burner and you will find that things might look a bit more managable, even if it's a big task to do that work of foguring out what your priorities actually are.
I discovered your channel quite recently and after a long hiatus trying to make games and with some comic books and graphic design jobs on my back, I decided to give it another try and it's been super helpful! Thanks again!
Severely underrated video. Wow. I am really grateful for the videos you make, very high quality uploads. As someone who has dabbled in making art and assets, this video really opened my eyes with regard to keeping things simple for background assets and art. Thank you for another great insight!
@@thirdboot I don't know, but I'm guessing to avoid making things overly complicated for the sake of it in favor of simpler things that are aligned with what a song is mainly about (not only thematically but musically or genre wise). That's just my interpretation tho 😅
I never leave comments on videos but I just discovered your channel while working on my new game and that was such a helpful video !! Best advices ever, I love every part of it, thank you !
Thanks for sharing! It's stunning how different it seems from a full detailed bg to a plan background and one that uses details sparringly. I think this also has a lot to do with player stress management and mental capacity. Maybe one could reverse this to pump up a a section that draws out the player and hypes up certain areas or pre boss fights.
This is an awesome video! I often struggle with overworking all my artwork for a game and it ends up taking way to long to get an asset that works, so from now on I'm gonna remember this lesson
As always, very helpful. I have fallen exactly in this trap you describe here with my current project. I tried to make everything interesting and complex. I have noticed it’s hard to know when some important actions for the player are occurring. So I wanted to add some extra things to alert the player about those. Which only made things worse
This is such a wonderful video, this must've taken forever to make. The examples are so clear and well made and the presentation is to the point and easy to understand.
Fantastic insight. It's pretty rare to get such great information for non pixel art 2D (although this could obviously be applied to other styles). Thanks!
Incredibly well said! This concept of detail management is vital in game development. If you want to get projects done, it’s important to keep this idea in mind. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
Amazing tutorial! Thank you! Great content as always. You're the only one on RUclips who talks about game assets like this. Wow. Keep up sharing your knowledge and philosophy about game art, please!
I'm a programmer creating a new terminal emulator, which has nothing to do with video game art, and yet the subject matter strangely applies to my own work. You have a new fan.
I totally see the point and am 100% with you. I was a game developer and i tried to argue about this with an artist. He did not see it because he did not care for zhe whole picture. No mater if you are right some artists wont listen to game developers..
2:19 No, no, you see, the problem is that that single vine on the right is not shaded properly. I bet that if you added *more* colors and shading to it, it would tie it all together, and end up looking amazing.
This video is awesome and will seriously help my art design for games. I have almost no art experience and zero game dev or coding experience; but this will seriously help focus my efforts and clean up my work. Thank you!
Having your foreground be a different color from the background can help readability a lot. Pizza Tower, for example, doesn't have super detailed tiles, but a lot of stages still have backgrounds with very similar color schemes as the foreground. So when you run through the stage at high speeds, it can be hard to judge at a glimpse what's part of the foreground and what isn't. And when your game is all about speed, you really want every screen to be readable as quickly as possible.
I'm not an artist and I don't make games but I was recommended this video and really enjoyed it. Easy to understand advice even for complete novices like me and you used some great examples to illustrate your points, I'm sure these took a lot of time to plan and draw. To be honest, some of this advice is probably useful for my own creative process too. I make videos using After Effects and it's too easy to spend a lot of extra time on some detail that's either distracting or unnecessary.
Art isn't just about skill- it's about your vision and level of maturity. I do pixel art, but you have inspired me to hand drawn art. Maybe in the future. Thanks
Always good to see a focus on human factors and cognitive science. AAA game studios have been taking these for granted, slowly losing developers who acknowledge the importance of the topics.
This reminds me of a fundamental piece of art advice I got in college that dramatically improved my drawing. When you draw a thing, draw its texture not its details. This advice is evident in his bush example, but really driven home with the grass. The _detail_ of grass is individual blades, so that's what you may instinctively want to draw. However, the _texture_ of grass is one large blanket coating the ground, so that's what will actually look good.
something kinda funny I realized while watching this video is you applied a lot of the same details to the background of your set/room. Like at 12:25 the lights and your face clearly draw the focus of the shot, whereas the wall in the background is allowed to basically just be dark squares that draw no attention because they arent important.
Making details seperate to place them at different spots also makes it a lot more organic. If every bush has a blue flower than it breaks the emersion. Adding depth also really helps. For example making bushes darker when they are further away than assets infront of them like platforms or putting another darker bush layer behind other bushes!
This also aplies to most production art. You have to think about the "whole", as if you are playing the game. Small details require intention as well. An often overlooked aspect is UI. If you design something too big, then it can crowd the UI.
Seeing how everything fits together in game is crucial for any success. Your grass/bush might be just the right shade of green, but when used with your background, it appears half invisible since the background is a similar green.
my suggestion is to start the asset creation with a paintover the level layout. make it look good as an illustration. then break it apart into possible assets. That guarantees a better cohesion in the final design.
Simple/generic assets are good for things that the player will constantly see. Those assets are very good at modularity and can be placed anywhere in the game. Specialized assets are good at commanding the player's attention but too many of them would cause visual overload. One example of bad use of over-specialized assets is 7 Days to Die's zombie models. They are super detailed but, since you'll see them so often, you'll recognize the same zombies repeatedly, making the player less immersed. A good example of this is Project Zomboid. The zombies are so simple that you can have millions of them and nothing in particular is giving you any visual fatigue. But when you see a zombie with a weapon or backpack, it instantly makes you focus on it because it's so unique. The main character should be of a higher quality than most assets because the player will be seeing them most of the time.
This is probably the hardest concept to take in as a game artist, specially at the beginning of your journey. I still struggle sometimes, even after years of experience.
Love the video, very good advice for all levels of artist! One thing I would note is some of this is dependent on style and genre; very detailed backgrounds can work as long as there is established visual clarity between elements and good composition. Cuphead is a great example of this, they apply high saturation cel shading and outlines to moving assets such as platforms, enemies, and projectiles. While almost all walking ground is a simple less saturated pattern and backgrounds are shaded with pencil outlines. But this style works because precision platforming is not as important in this game as something like Hollow Knight or Celeste, and therefore any clarity issues are generally forgivable when tracking Cuphead's movements across the screen.
Yes, I agree. I think there is significantly more nuance to this topic and I glossed over a considerable amount of things, you can even see a quick shot of a previous scene I've made that does have an incredible amount of detail but still looks fine thanks to handling negative space and contrast decently well. Or you can look at games like gunbrella (which looks great) which has a lot of fairly cluttered detail, but the composition makes it work quite well nonetheless. My intention was kind of to highlight an extreme example in order to build the intuition of a beginner, which is why I also avoided speaking about composition and focal points. For a lot of really good artists I think the advice I give here can kind of break down, which is what I try to touch on by the end of the video.
@@Nonsensical2D I understand, the information in your video is definitely core to beginners, and honestly helpful in broad strokes generally since its main focus is clarity. I only felt the need to point this out for beginners who are starting with extremely detailed styles or are looking to replicate old media in the hopes to help encourage them to continue rather than adopting other established styles. Sort of as a reassurance that there are other aspects that can make detailed backgrounds work 💝
In some ways, the exceedingly limited palette, tile size, and ROM/RAM limitations of early games forced artists to do this natively. One thing we used to do (making plug-and-play "TV games", which ran on chips comparable to an NES or SNES) was to block out the whole background/foreground scene in 2-4 colors, and then break it into tiles, looking for places where repeats would work. Each time a tile got close to being finished, we'd pop it onto that scene in as many places as it'd go. The software we used would update all the repeat tiles as you edited them, so you could _see_ the "noise" forming as you added detail/adjusted colors. I adore the look of many modern games and I haven't drawn that kind of stuff in decades, but I think I would struggle badly with detail balance without having those hardware limitations in place!
Great advice! Now I have a new lens to view my game under .. hadn't really thought of it like this before. I think this works the same for 3D as well (just a bit harder to figure out composition maybe).
Very sound advice, for once. It's easy to focus on the intricate details of every tile and lose track of the entire scene. That's why it's a good idea to start with "dummy" assets, build a scene, then make more detailed ones as you need them.
So its kinda like the next step of white boxing. White boxing is to get the shape of the level down before you work on the assets so that you know if the level works. After white boxing add art assets but still keep them low detail. Once you verify that the current asset are not detracting or drawing your attention to unimportant parts of the level add a little more detail. If it is still not detracting add one or two higher detail assets.
Safeguard against this is to thumbnail or mockup what you want the game screen to look like in your graphics program. Remember that the art you're making isn't the asset, it's everything in the game window. Once you have a mockup then create the pieces to assemble the level in the game. Include the character art for reference. It will also save you from drawing a bunch of stuff you end up not using because you'll be more sure of exactly what your scene needs. The detail problem will happen very often if you start by creating individual assets instead of thinking about the big picture first (literally)
@Nonsensical2D Ok i think i got a way to make this memorable at least for my brain. Correct me if i dont hit all the nessecary points. "Assets on screen should be like music in a band. If everything is as loud as everything with no clear thing to follow the listener will become frustrated and confused. But if people can identify meaning and patterns then you can get them into a pattern loop and they can understand things. The same is true for Asset Art".
Hope this helps a lot of beginner game devs. These are struggles I often see among students even after a year of studying video game art/graphics at university.
One good example of this principle in action could be Factorio. Every building asset has a simple shape with a kinda comically large engineering-related distinctive feature but zoom in on one and it reveals beautiful mechanical details and interlocking features. Some of the sprites are 3D renders, though.
Higher contrast normally in real life means objects are in the immediate foreground so they get our attention first, like the sharp contrast between the jaws of a bear and the back of his throat
What anime and some cartoons usually do is have two different styles. One for the static objects, and another for the active objects. Static is not necessarily the background. Just anything that will never be animated. In a video game, these would be anything that the player doesn't interact with or what will be homogenized with similar assets to make a complete scene. (Like Minecraft blocks) Usually, the static objects use a style with no outline or watercolor, while active objects use the style the directors want. This helps visually distinguish backgrounds from the main focus of a piece. If we apply this to video game assets, you want to give a bold outline to your active objects, and the rest should have soft lighting and more blob-like details. However, you don't necessarily have to follow this. In the New Super Mario Bros. games, everything is in the same style. But what makes them visually distinct and clear is that static objects are quite rare and every object in a scene usually has a purpose. The tilesets usually consist of smooth but familiar shapes, and if a tile has a function (such as flowers giving coins or brick blocks being breakable) they are visually striking either through an animation, detail, or both. Even then, they still follow the principle of simplicity, so a lot of static objects in the Mario games tend to blend in with the environment and allow players to focus more on what they need to focus on.
when i first saw the two bushes, one looked better and i thought of it as "interactable", like i would be able to interact with it and get some kind of item from it, whereas the other wouldn't be interactable. so that's something to note!
Just like with any art: basically focus on what should/ will be the most visible. I have this problem when im working on my projects where I focus on everything to even the most minut details (and I usually screw up something obvious because of that) but there's no point. People will not see what you see. They will focus on what you want to show them the most. My most praised project was literally a super low effort depression ridden thing that I barely managed to make because I had no motivation. Funny how that works... But yeah, it's very important to take a step back and its super hard to learn when you are a perfectionist. Perfectionism is the archenemy of progress (and learning new things). Don't fall down that spiral.
It's super easy if you use Godot or unity (gamemaker and other game engines might work as well) but it is basically just a particle effect system, since I use Godot this was done using the particle2D node. It shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes to set up if you find a tutorial.
Hmm… …I wonder if the artists would do well to draw the entire composition as a whole, and then divide it into individual assets, keeping an eye for the whole balance.
I have covered my actual approach a bit before. But I tend to take a screenshot of my tile map and then throw that screenshot into my drawing software and just block in the main shapes. With those shapes I can often copy them onto a new canvas and scale it up. So kind of similar to the approach you mentioned.
Kind of an odd topic because it superficially doesn't seem to have much to do with drawing, but I see many games that have this type of issue, where their art looks bad even though they can kind of draw somewhat decent assets. Hopefully this video made sense and hopefully the pacing wasn't too slow. Ohh and the video got significantly more delayed than I had hoped, I was originally working on another video but got forced to finish this one first (which made the release delayed), next video will hopefully come next week. Feedback or comments are appreciated as always.
I really benefited from the specific tips in this video that other RUclipsrs gloss over. Can't wait for the next one!
How come ori looks so good when you can argue that every asset is incredibly detailed? What's ori's magic that makes it work so well?
This is where it kind of gets slightly more complicated in a way that I didn't quite want to get into in the video. The topic I am really discussing is composition in many ways, I'm just avoiding using the word. And the problem isn't really necessarily "details" itself, it is rather that when some people add "details" what they are really doing is trying to create a "focal point" (a point that demands attention) in the scene, without knowing that they are doing so. But in Ori, ghost song, gunbrella and many other games, every asset is intricate, but the main focus is still on the scene as a whole, rather than an individual asset, and the artists are very mindful of where their focal points are.
I tried touching on this at the end of the video but I think composition is extremely tricky as a subject and a lot of the time I (and experienced artists) don't evaluate whether a scene "works" in the way I describe in the video. What I and many artists do are just go by experience and have a sense for where our eyes look when we look at a game or a painting. And since we have that "intuition", we can also more easily break precisely the "rules" I describe in the video, because we have a sense for when our details are "fine" and when our details aren't "fine". What I am trying to do in this video is to describe the issue in broad strokes, so that a people know to look for it, and kind of start building their own intuition for how to solve it.
@@Nonsensical2D would appreciate a more in-depth video on this topic of composition. You once made a video where you dressed up an area from tilemap to finish. Was one of your best videos imo because seeing it in practice makes it all the more clear
Jonathan Blow had that problem while making Braid. In an interview (or talk) he explained that the first version of graphics after the gray boxing was terrible, even though it looked very pretty.
The main point is, like said in the video here, is to focus on how readable the game is.
If the background *looks* like it's in the background, the player can quickly discard it. And if things that are important *look* important, they will pay attention.
For Braid, I believe the fix was to blur the background slightly, and make it less saturated, and add some stronger outlines to the important elements. It was a while ago since I watched the video regarding it, and it was more about how the game was made in general, but it could be worth having a look at for an example of how to fix detailed graphics.
In Ori, they use parallax so that background graphics actually look to be further away, as well as lighting and higher contrast around the terrain. But I also recall that it sometimes was hard to tell at a glance where you can go in Ori. Not often, but there are times where you die because you couldn't read the environment properly.
The main point is that the game is easy to "read", that is that you should be able to quickly determine what something is. Ground, or pitfall. Enemy or background. Because a lot of that builds on both psychology (such as people going towards lit up areas subconsciously) as well as "tradition" (such as yellow marking a climbable surface) its one of those things that you can get inspiration from older titles in how to do it.
this is the game designer's version of "Don't just stay zoomed in on your art software, zoom out every so often or just draw zoomed out to avoid spending 5 hours on a blade of grass that is barely visible in the final image" lol
this is jarringly universal advice in a way i dont even think you realized, as a very experienced artist im kicking myself because i feel like this should be obvious but you really made me realize how in _any_ background design this is so important, I'm putting this in the design doc for a _3d animation_ im making, lol. great video holy shit.
It`s the kind of advice that we need to repeat to ourselves over and over until it becomes 2nd nature.
Sounds like stupid advice to me, it's completely missing what's important.
@@nightmareTomek How come? what is more important? I think this is solid advice
@@ColePhoebs There are games that have a lot of detail and it's fine. I think more important is how you handle that detail instead of how much there is. The player character for example shouldn't have less details than the environment, that would be weird. Also readibility is important, you want to bring out the foreground and that's often done with removing contrast from the background, or blurring it, also making it a different color would be fine. Details would still be there though.
I kind of agree with you, which I expanded upon in a reply to my stickied comment. You are right that the problem itself isn't details, instead I would say that beginners sometimes create inadvertent focal points or are bad at handling separation and readability when they make "details". I was aware of this 'misnomer' when making the video, I just wanted to have a simpler way to introduce the topic of composition and readability that a beginner can relate to. My thinking was that a beginner might not be fully aware of the problems that can occur when they "add things and add details", and in that sense I wanted to ease into the topic by mentioning "details", but further down the line actually discuss the real issue with details such as poor handling of value contrast, hue contrast and saturation. Using a 'misnomer' of sorts when making this video might have been a bad choice, but my main attempt when making videos like this is to build the intuition to recognise an issue, rather than get too in depth with 'art language'.
With all of this said, I am not always a fan of the idea that you should solve poor composition with "atmospheric perspective" and a blur shader. it works, but I think it is important to actually think about your composition and have decent separation as is. This is in some ways preference I guess, but I think learning to handle and deal with negative space can often help give you better scenes than to just throw on a blur shader and call it a day. But ye, I think your criticism is fair overall, although I do feel it is unfair to call it missing what is important, when I do actually discuss the issue being poor handling of contrast (just as you mentioned).
I really like what you said: that you would add an asset that IS a a detail, but avoid adding detailed assets.
Good thought.
it's like in painting, photography, or even writing. contrast, or the law of conservation of detail. you can draw attention to a spot by making it brighter or more detailed than everything else. but you can't have everything bright or everything dark and expect that to be coherent or interesting. just like you wouldn't want to read a book about an adventure where the author spends 30 pages talking about the dew on a blade of grass. this is actually related to the yellow paint problem in modern big budget games. high fidelity "realistic" graphics are visually noisy and make it unclear where the gameplay is supposed to happen
What's even worse is that games like RE4 used that perfectly to make navigation more tense and risky, just for them to piss on it with yellow paint in the remake.
"high fidelity "realistic" graphics are visually noisy and make it unclear where the gameplay is supposed to happen"
Thank you for putting into words what I've been trying to explain about more detailed graphics for a long time. Sometime around the PS4/XB1 era I noticed some games would have so much going on on the screen it became difficult to read the game so to speak. It takes really skilled artists to make something visually complex but maintain the readability necessary for video games. Sometimes it's not even about where gameplay is supposed to happen it's just visually overwhelming, too much to look at at once. If the artist hasn't delineated where you're supposed to be focusing it all begins to blur together despite the much higher resolution/polygon count.
The "standard bush" version looks more like typical gameplay, while the "flowerbush" feels more like a deliberately empty area for environmental storytelling, like you're about to walk up to a headstone, read the name, and then get absolutely floored by what you just read
Thanks for this!! I'm the artist on a team of devs, and I sometimes have to remind the team (myself included) that more doesn't always mean better. It can be easy to get swept up into details, and forget to compare assets to each other to make sure they all flow nicely. Great visual examples!
It still depends in what you want to make.
But yes, you still have a point.
Hierarchy of detail is super important and its definitely easy to forget that the game is the final piece when working on individual assets. Very cool video!
I’ve been watching many of your art-related videos, and they’ve really helped me become less 'bad at art' on my current project! One thing I’ve started doing that has saved me time is making incremental changes. I place an asset in my game as soon as possible, even if it looks incomplete, and then iterate on it whenever I see opportunities for improvement. While it does means doing a lot of touch-ups, it still saves me time and helps me avoid overcomplicating things.
This method works for me too! It can also be a good way to feel out style and color if I feel indecisive about designs
@TheUnsupported are you an indie developer?
@rosepainting8775 Yep! I used to make Flash games a long time ago. But last year, I picked up Godot and I am working toward my first release! 😀
Pro tip. To start, only add detail to the areas of your level that the player can interact with. Drawing the player’s eye to non-game assets is distracting. :)
Even though this knowledge is a fundamental in cartooning, which is foundational to most of the art styles shown here, it's very nice to be able to hear this in such a concise and accessible manner. I've been feeling kind of "blehg" about the backgrounds that I've been drawing for a project as of late, and this was very reassuring to watch. You did such a great job at providing examples of problems, and getting the mind to think of solutions to a problem in it's own way while you showed solutions of your own.
This was an excellent reason to stay up to midnight tonight, thank you!
I really think pixelart is a good beginner choice. Low res prevents from adding too much detail, use of limited palettes teaches how colors work with each other.
Good pixel art is extremely difficult, bad pixel art is easy
@@prestonharris7406that's true for literally every kind of art, be it visual or otherwise
@@zitronekoma30 yes but people have big misconceptions when it comes to pixel art difficulty though.
@prestonharris7406 that's very true
10min of pure information.
I learnt alot. Thanks.
Personally, I just create the scene I want to make in an art program, and then work towards replicating it in the actual game. kinda like concept art.
that way, anything that looks bad will get fixed while I'm drawing the concept art, and I'll have that info in mind when I go ahead and start making sprites.
Great video! I think that one important advice I could give to game artists is not to put your assets into a scene when they're done but to draw them in the context of your scene right from the get go. When you draw assets in context (for example in context of a game screenshot or you just start with drawing the background first and then draw everything in front of that like it's all part of one painting), you won't run into the issue where your isolatedly nice asset suddenly looks bad when you put it into your game.
This is something I learnt when I fell into special effects and later visual effects for TV and film.
A good art director knows “functional minimalism” and unified colours. A good director knows how to work with the pallet and minimalism.
I once created a magic prop for a live TV show. It was an archive cabinet with a hidden small A4 thermal printer mounted in the table underneath and there’s a midden slot in the table top and the archive cabinet that allows us to predict everything. The cabinet I sourced was metal I repainted it and put some ornate handles on it etc. It was metal so it had highlights under the live rotating head lights. The director came onset and pointed out the speculaties highlights and especially when the lights moved and it drew the eyes away (movement pulls people’s attention) and so he asked the prop guys to make a very mundane wooden archive box, no metal details that reflected except for the locks that was required to prove we didn’t get into teh box.
And it looked dull, not interesting. And that was exactly the purposes, no suspicion and no disrupting the attention from the mentalist and the celebrity in the act.
A lot of composits I did in the beginning I got the suggestion to depth blur assets I competed except for the focus area.
It’s fascinating in a rather subjective way.
Nonsensical 2D casually being the best gamedev youtuber on the internet
This was really great advice. I reeled back sharply when I saw how "noisy" the example art was, and I'm glad you broke it down!
Thank you so much for making this and your other videos! Your videos about game art composition have been really helpful and informative! As a programmer and not an artist, after watching your videos, I actually have some hope that I might be able to make some basic art for my game that doesn't look too bad.
This is something that is relevant in all fields of art and illustration, honestly. Contrast in detail complexity, colour and light are the base driving forces of what pulls on ✨ Attention ✨
Also relevant in life in general, tbh; If everything is high priority, nothing is high priority. And if everything is high priority, you get stressed trying to deal with everything at once. Figure out what's important and actually needs attention, and what can/should be left on the back burner and you will find that things might look a bit more managable, even if it's a big task to do that work of foguring out what your priorities actually are.
I feel like a learned 3 years of art school in 13 minutes. Thankyou for this brilliant and educational video. Subbed
I discovered your channel quite recently and after a long hiatus trying to make games and with some comic books and graphic design jobs on my back, I decided to give it another try and it's been super helpful! Thanks again!
Severely underrated video. Wow. I am really grateful for the videos you make, very high quality uploads. As someone who has dabbled in making art and assets, this video really opened my eyes with regard to keeping things simple for background assets and art. Thank you for another great insight!
You really are one of the gods in art, this is the first video I watched from you, and, even though I’m picky I’ll subscribe right now.
This is basically "serve the song" for visual art. Very important advice!
I'm curious, what's serving the song?
@@thirdboot I don't know, but I'm guessing to avoid making things overly complicated for the sake of it in favor of simpler things that are aligned with what a song is mainly about (not only thematically but musically or genre wise). That's just my interpretation tho 😅
@@thirdboot Like Ringo's drumming in the Beatles. It doesn't stand out but blends in a natural way.
I was in the middle of redrawing a scene and this was exactly what I needed, thanks!
I never leave comments on videos but I just discovered your channel while working on my new game and that was such a helpful video !! Best advices ever, I love every part of it, thank you !
Thanks for sharing! It's stunning how different it seems from a full detailed bg to a plan background and one that uses details sparringly. I think this also has a lot to do with player stress management and mental capacity. Maybe one could reverse this to pump up a a section that draws out the player and hypes up certain areas or pre boss fights.
I'm so so glad i found this before I went hard into my assets... I'm horrible at spending time on details. Thanks for the tips!
This is an awesome video! I often struggle with overworking all my artwork for a game and it ends up taking way to long to get an asset that works, so from now on I'm gonna remember this lesson
As always, very helpful. I have fallen exactly in this trap you describe here with my current project. I tried to make everything interesting and complex.
I have noticed it’s hard to know when some important actions for the player are occurring.
So I wanted to add some extra things to alert the player about those.
Which only made things worse
I love the idea of using psychology to improve not only making assets, but efficiency in working on art in general.
This is such a wonderful video, this must've taken forever to make. The examples are so clear and well made and the presentation is to the point and easy to understand.
Fantastic insight. It's pretty rare to get such great information for non pixel art 2D (although this could obviously be applied to other styles). Thanks!
Incredibly well said! This concept of detail management is vital in game development. If you want to get projects done, it’s important to keep this idea in mind. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
Amazing tutorial! Thank you! Great content as always. You're the only one on RUclips who talks about game assets like this. Wow. Keep up sharing your knowledge and philosophy about game art, please!
I'm a programmer creating a new terminal emulator, which has nothing to do with video game art, and yet the subject matter strangely applies to my own work. You have a new fan.
I totally see the point and am 100% with you. I was a game developer and i tried to argue about this with an artist. He did not see it because he did not care for zhe whole picture. No mater if you are right some artists wont listen to game developers..
2:19 No, no, you see, the problem is that that single vine on the right is not shaded properly. I bet that if you added *more* colors and shading to it, it would tie it all together, and end up looking amazing.
Great vid. This is pure common sense, and yet it's hugely valuable to hear it and to visualize it in examples.
Thanks.
This video is awesome and will seriously help my art design for games. I have almost no art experience and zero game dev or coding experience; but this will seriously help focus my efforts and clean up my work. Thank you!
Having your foreground be a different color from the background can help readability a lot.
Pizza Tower, for example, doesn't have super detailed tiles, but a lot of stages still have backgrounds with very similar color schemes as the foreground. So when you run through the stage at high speeds, it can be hard to judge at a glimpse what's part of the foreground and what isn't.
And when your game is all about speed, you really want every screen to be readable as quickly as possible.
Great video, I knew about this topic before, but you really have a talent for picking good examples and presenting what works and what doesn't. 👍
I'm not an artist and I don't make games but I was recommended this video and really enjoyed it. Easy to understand advice even for complete novices like me and you used some great examples to illustrate your points, I'm sure these took a lot of time to plan and draw. To be honest, some of this advice is probably useful for my own creative process too. I make videos using After Effects and it's too easy to spend a lot of extra time on some detail that's either distracting or unnecessary.
Art isn't just about skill- it's about your vision and level of maturity.
I do pixel art, but you have inspired me to hand drawn art. Maybe in the future. Thanks
Always good to see a focus on human factors and cognitive science. AAA game studios have been taking these for granted, slowly losing developers who acknowledge the importance of the topics.
That was a nice way to explain a pretty important concept when it comes to game art.
I already understood it but it was still an interesting watch
This reminds me of a fundamental piece of art advice I got in college that dramatically improved my drawing. When you draw a thing, draw its texture not its details.
This advice is evident in his bush example, but really driven home with the grass. The _detail_ of grass is individual blades, so that's what you may instinctively want to draw. However, the _texture_ of grass is one large blanket coating the ground, so that's what will actually look good.
Clear and straight to the point, thank you for your effort 🙏🏼
something kinda funny I realized while watching this video is you applied a lot of the same details to the background of your set/room. Like at 12:25 the lights and your face clearly draw the focus of the shot, whereas the wall in the background is allowed to basically just be dark squares that draw no attention because they arent important.
Making details seperate to place them at different spots also makes it a lot more organic. If every bush has a blue flower than it breaks the emersion.
Adding depth also really helps. For example making bushes darker when they are further away than assets infront of them like platforms or putting another darker bush layer behind other bushes!
so much useful information, direct to the point, great visual examples. thank you so much!
So simple yet to important! Thanks for this insight!
Im glad this popped onto my feed. I am an artist and not a game dev proper, I am always wondering WHAT assets I should prepare for repeated use
This also aplies to most production art. You have to think about the "whole", as if you are playing the game. Small details require intention as well.
An often overlooked aspect is UI. If you design something too big, then it can crowd the UI.
Great to see a new video!
Have you ever thought about enabling donations for those of us who want to support you?
Seeing how everything fits together in game is crucial for any success. Your grass/bush might be just the right shade of green, but when used with your background, it appears half invisible since the background is a similar green.
my suggestion is to start the asset creation with a paintover the level layout. make it look good as an illustration. then break it apart into possible assets. That guarantees a better cohesion in the final design.
Great video from one of my favorite channels.
Simple/generic assets are good for things that the player will constantly see. Those assets are very good at modularity and can be placed anywhere in the game. Specialized assets are good at commanding the player's attention but too many of them would cause visual overload. One example of bad use of over-specialized assets is 7 Days to Die's zombie models. They are super detailed but, since you'll see them so often, you'll recognize the same zombies repeatedly, making the player less immersed. A good example of this is Project Zomboid. The zombies are so simple that you can have millions of them and nothing in particular is giving you any visual fatigue. But when you see a zombie with a weapon or backpack, it instantly makes you focus on it because it's so unique. The main character should be of a higher quality than most assets because the player will be seeing them most of the time.
Loved It - I Always wait for your Videos, They are Really Helpful ! Thank you !!
Really well made video. I just started making my own assets so this is going to be very helpfull and prevent some tedious trial and error.❤
This is probably the hardest concept to take in as a game artist, specially at the beginning of your journey. I still struggle sometimes, even after years of experience.
I can't draw anything.. And this video taught me a lot about how not drawing too much can be helpful. Thanks
Love the video, very good advice for all levels of artist! One thing I would note is some of this is dependent on style and genre; very detailed backgrounds can work as long as there is established visual clarity between elements and good composition.
Cuphead is a great example of this, they apply high saturation cel shading and outlines to moving assets such as platforms, enemies, and projectiles. While almost all walking ground is a simple less saturated pattern and backgrounds are shaded with pencil outlines. But this style works because precision platforming is not as important in this game as something like Hollow Knight or Celeste, and therefore any clarity issues are generally forgivable when tracking Cuphead's movements across the screen.
Yes, I agree. I think there is significantly more nuance to this topic and I glossed over a considerable amount of things, you can even see a quick shot of a previous scene I've made that does have an incredible amount of detail but still looks fine thanks to handling negative space and contrast decently well. Or you can look at games like gunbrella (which looks great) which has a lot of fairly cluttered detail, but the composition makes it work quite well nonetheless. My intention was kind of to highlight an extreme example in order to build the intuition of a beginner, which is why I also avoided speaking about composition and focal points. For a lot of really good artists I think the advice I give here can kind of break down, which is what I try to touch on by the end of the video.
@@Nonsensical2D I understand, the information in your video is definitely core to beginners, and honestly helpful in broad strokes generally since its main focus is clarity. I only felt the need to point this out for beginners who are starting with extremely detailed styles or are looking to replicate old media in the hopes to help encourage them to continue rather than adopting other established styles. Sort of as a reassurance that there are other aspects that can make detailed backgrounds work 💝
In some ways, the exceedingly limited palette, tile size, and ROM/RAM limitations of early games forced artists to do this natively.
One thing we used to do (making plug-and-play "TV games", which ran on chips comparable to an NES or SNES) was to block out the whole background/foreground scene in 2-4 colors, and then break it into tiles, looking for places where repeats would work. Each time a tile got close to being finished, we'd pop it onto that scene in as many places as it'd go. The software we used would update all the repeat tiles as you edited them, so you could _see_ the "noise" forming as you added detail/adjusted colors.
I adore the look of many modern games and I haven't drawn that kind of stuff in decades, but I think I would struggle badly with detail balance without having those hardware limitations in place!
Great advice! Now I have a new lens to view my game under .. hadn't really thought of it like this before. I think this works the same for 3D as well (just a bit harder to figure out composition maybe).
Great tips, still working on drawing some assets for my game. This was very helpful. Thank you
Very sound advice, for once. It's easy to focus on the intricate details of every tile and lose track of the entire scene. That's why it's a good idea to start with "dummy" assets, build a scene, then make more detailed ones as you need them.
7:39 these blocks look a lot like NES games, like Castlevania 1, so i think this is a stylistic choice rather than a flaw.
So its kinda like the next step of white boxing. White boxing is to get the shape of the level down before you work on the assets so that you know if the level works. After white boxing add art assets but still keep them low detail. Once you verify that the current asset are not detracting or drawing your attention to unimportant parts of the level add a little more detail. If it is still not detracting add one or two higher detail assets.
Excellent explanation of the principle of the "Opalescent Abyss"
Great advice for aspiring game developers!
I dont even do game art, but this advice will help me a lot on a current illustration im working on! Thank you so much for this vídeo ❤
Brilliantly shown.
Brilliant advice, thank you!
Amazing, helpful stuff. I always am learning something new from you.
Safeguard against this is to thumbnail or mockup what you want the game screen to look like in your graphics program. Remember that the art you're making isn't the asset, it's everything in the game window. Once you have a mockup then create the pieces to assemble the level in the game. Include the character art for reference. It will also save you from drawing a bunch of stuff you end up not using because you'll be more sure of exactly what your scene needs. The detail problem will happen very often if you start by creating individual assets instead of thinking about the big picture first (literally)
You are completely right! Great video
You are creating excellent videos as usual.
@Nonsensical2D Ok i think i got a way to make this memorable at least for my brain. Correct me if i dont hit all the nessecary points.
"Assets on screen should be like music in a band.
If everything is as loud as everything with no clear thing to follow the listener will become frustrated and confused.
But if people can identify meaning and patterns then you can get them into a pattern loop and they can understand things.
The same is true for Asset Art".
"Quite a bit of you" here. I just want to say thank you for your videos, knowledge, and inspiration. Have an amazing week.
this is actually amazing
Hope this helps a lot of beginner game devs. These are struggles I often see among students even after a year of studying video game art/graphics at university.
Thank you for this advice! How to make a good asset and understanding color too.
This is very important! I now understand why I don't like the scene I'm drawing right now!
One good example of this principle in action could be Factorio. Every building asset has a simple shape with a kinda comically large engineering-related distinctive feature but zoom in on one and it reveals beautiful mechanical details and interlocking features. Some of the sprites are 3D renders, though.
Higher contrast normally in real life means objects are in the immediate foreground so they get our attention first, like the sharp contrast between the jaws of a bear and the back of his throat
What anime and some cartoons usually do is have two different styles. One for the static objects, and another for the active objects. Static is not necessarily the background. Just anything that will never be animated. In a video game, these would be anything that the player doesn't interact with or what will be homogenized with similar assets to make a complete scene. (Like Minecraft blocks)
Usually, the static objects use a style with no outline or watercolor, while active objects use the style the directors want. This helps visually distinguish backgrounds from the main focus of a piece.
If we apply this to video game assets, you want to give a bold outline to your active objects, and the rest should have soft lighting and more blob-like details.
However, you don't necessarily have to follow this. In the New Super Mario Bros. games, everything is in the same style. But what makes them visually distinct and clear is that static objects are quite rare and every object in a scene usually has a purpose. The tilesets usually consist of smooth but familiar shapes, and if a tile has a function (such as flowers giving coins or brick blocks being breakable) they are visually striking either through an animation, detail, or both. Even then, they still follow the principle of simplicity, so a lot of static objects in the Mario games tend to blend in with the environment and allow players to focus more on what they need to focus on.
when i first saw the two bushes, one looked better and i thought of it as "interactable", like i would be able to interact with it and get some kind of item from it, whereas the other wouldn't be interactable. so that's something to note!
Just like with any art: basically focus on what should/ will be the most visible. I have this problem when im working on my projects where I focus on everything to even the most minut details (and I usually screw up something obvious because of that) but there's no point. People will not see what you see. They will focus on what you want to show them the most. My most praised project was literally a super low effort depression ridden thing that I barely managed to make because I had no motivation. Funny how that works... But yeah, it's very important to take a step back and its super hard to learn when you are a perfectionist. Perfectionism is the archenemy of progress (and learning new things). Don't fall down that spiral.
Grass is usually placed randomly, with some kind of noise… in 3d. In 2d, the camera is usually orthographic, so these principles make a lot of sense
Awesome video! Really like your style. Can I ask how you did the animated background at 6:50?
It's super easy if you use Godot or unity (gamemaker and other game engines might work as well) but it is basically just a particle effect system, since I use Godot this was done using the particle2D node. It shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes to set up if you find a tutorial.
@@Nonsensical2D awesome, I use Godot. Thanks!
Hmm… …I wonder if the artists would do well to draw the entire composition as a whole, and then divide it into individual assets, keeping an eye for the whole balance.
I have covered my actual approach a bit before. But I tend to take a screenshot of my tile map and then throw that screenshot into my drawing software and just block in the main shapes. With those shapes I can often copy them onto a new canvas and scale it up. So kind of similar to the approach you mentioned.
Great video. I am a victim of this. "How does this asset fit the scene?" is the question we should ask all the time
Waw thanks this is amazing, I stumble across this video in my yt, and now I get advice I can apply in my game.
This was insanely useful. Thank you
Excellent! Thanks!
This video is gold
I found this very informative! Thank you!