How do YOU make your game look good?

I for one have a few tricks up my sleeve to just, make the game look as professional as possible with a few simple steps. Something that will just make your player say, "Yeah, this game has been worked on." Something that most games have (for example, crouching or sprinting).

Something that turns your newbie indie test prototype into a game.

So how do you do this?

What do you use to kick-start your game or make it look good that you almost always use?

I'll give one of mine first:

I like to add a delayed rotation to the item in hand if it's a first person game to give the illusion of hands holding it. Valve does this a lot too.

 

There's stuff like the 0.7 second jump.

If you're making a realistic game with a human protagonist in Earth gravity, your jump should last a total of 0.7 seconds from leaving the floor to landing on the floor. Anything more or less than this value feels wrong to the player (see Halo's jump - which is something like 3.4 seconds and feels horrible and floaty).

 

Yeah I know how unrealistic Halo jumping is!

Also its good to have your cursor actually locked most of the time if it's a shooter or similar game, otherwise it still feels like you've only worked on it for a few minutes.

 

for first person shooters look/sway/recoil.

It also helps to give a little depth to the guns....smoke, blurred screen edges when shooting, nice impact effects e.t.c

 

I send em to doctor ray to fix the graphics.

 

Yeah and also it helps if the gun is not the focus of the game, but off to the side or below you, as in real life you don't hold the gun up to your face all the time so you can see how cool it looks.

And I'm also talking about things you could do in Unity free to trick people into thinking it's pro.

Like overlapping a blurred texture over the camera instead of counting on Unity Pro's camera effects.

 

All the little details and touches.
The feel of the thing, that x factor where it's top playable but also forgiving to mistakes.

Slapping a smooth tween on things, endlessly tweaking shaders, general polish. All the tricks in the world will still end up with an ugly and rough game without great art assets. Some of the things that really get to me is when you've got great art, then the programmer S***s on it with some bad text and effects.

For example the new gladiator style infinity blade clone done in unity... awesome models, lovely art, let down by the worst programmer grey gradient text I've seen in years and a piss poor spinning shield animation when it loads. I say this openly without intending to offend.... just fix those glaring butt ugly bits in your games, people. It doesn't take five minutes to add an extra bit of polish.

Polish... that is what makes the difference.

Moral of the story: if you're a programmer, and have no more art assets, then just get someone to take a look at anything you do personally. Don't ruin it with your graphics.

edit: I probably came off harsh because although its a great game with some good code overall, the effects, text and fluff really lower it for me. It actually angers me. It's like the polish phase got skipped.

You don't need amazing unique shaders. Here's what you need for your polish: add blend, multiply blend. Stick that in and watch stuff glow, sparkle and add richness in subtle ways.

 

I think that polishing and lots of testing is a key for good looking game.A simple bug can screw up whole game experience so the point is just polishing and lots of testing.And to listen your players.

 

Its not a clone, its "inspired-by"

 

Personally, I think the interface makes the game. A game can have amazing graphics and gameplay, but if the GUI and/or HUD look sloppy it will drastically detract from the polished feel of the game. I won't release a game until I'm satisfied with the GUI and HUD.

 

making a good looking game is such an expansive question.

First off is the most logical great environmental artists good colors, good world design, and make sure your normal maps have depth to them. Second great animator make sure things flow fluid and it feels nice to smack something and watch it recoil, or looks sweet to run around and shoot stuff. third of course the anchor of a project the programmer if stuff goes wrong here definitely ruins everything make sure he knows what hes doing i'm not a programmer so I cant say what they need to do hehe. fourth amazing lighting and effects it is said a great environment can be built with nothing but 50% gray diffuse if you have good lighting and effects many environments are built this way so when you add the color diffuse it can only improve from great to amazing. Sometimes things like wispy fog, or the fireflies buzzing around a cave can seal the deal and bring the player into your world.

my list:
Color palette (dont be the game where the town is made of one brick texture and one bland wood beam.)
Strong Normal Maps
Strong specular maps
Diffuse not fighting for shading information. (not always true as in some games like skyrim they bake the occlusion into the cave rock since it is indoor)
Clean UVS. (dont have that stretched wood frame, take 2 minutes to clean it up.)
Solid programming,
Subtle effects
Lighting to seal the deal.
Strong basic forms for modeling.

 

One thing that people overlook that I like a lot is color correction. You need unity pro but if you have it it makes an enormous difference, assuming your color curves are done well of course.

 

^^ what exactly does color correction do?

 

It adds contrast and more vibrant colors. It makes the game more visually pleasing. Imagine the difference between a low budget, local commercial and a professionally made, prime-time commercial.

 

Color curves map rgb values along a curve that you can create in photoshop or in Unity with it's curve system. This is useful because you can stretch the contrast by changing the rbg values appropriately and make a color more predominant in a light range by mapping the red, green and blue channels differently. Some common uses are mapping the highlights as orange and the shadows as either blue or green, but you can use color curves a lot more subtly or uniquely and create interesting effects. Films use this all the time (sometimes to a fault) and several games are catching on as well. Of course, it's easy to overdo it and make a game that looks like it only has two colors (*cough* gears of war), but I think even a subtle usage can make a scene look a lot better with little effort.



http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/script-ColorCorrectionEffect.html

 

Good thread !

Personally I find it the most difficult part of all. Because nowadays, gamers are legitimately used to superb graphics on consoles, and even on mobiles. So even if you are just a one man army, you have to be visually competitive. That's it, you have to be as good as a full graphic designer team.
8 monthes after having finished my background levels, I just realized they're not competitive anymore, I'll have to add even more details.

After analyzing a lot of simple but yet awesomely looking games all around, I found that the most enhancing work on visual details is nothing more but the same as in cinema : lighting. The best use you make of placing your lights, tuning their intensity, color, direction, and baking, the more your game does look AAA.
Da Vinci would be proudly smiling if he was still alive

 

Some points raised were it's down to art and the animator and lighting. I agree, but again, let me emphasise it: the programmer can make that very S***ty. Take running animations, that jerk when changing to another animation - spoiling the illusion.

 

Oh yeah absolutely .... I can testimony of that ...
I spent maybe 2 weeks at 12hrs/day just to code a proper animation blender (on top of the native crossfade). Like automatically distributing anims to blend towards managed layers via a List, managing/cleaning that list...

Or a Crossfade watcher function that would control the speed of the animation to be blended out in order not to be stopped before the blend has ended...

Or that other vicious function which would automatically adjust the offset between the Root bone and the parent object, to smooth out crossfades between anims where the char is starting at a different position ...

Now it's perfectly smooth, not a single bit of clunkiness in visuals even at Timescale 0.1f, but HOLY CRAP how much blood and sweat I spent on this, it's crazy.
The funny thing is that when I turn the speed to normal (1f), I'm not directly noticing the difference as it's too fast (in an already very fast paced game). But it is still feeling like something fundamental has changed.
It is those kinds of haircutting details that makes a gameplay feel smooth and solid. And it is the lack of working on coding those details which made some AAA games not feel "right", without knowing where the problem came from (= most MMO animations, to be blunt).

edit : speaking of which, it's horrible to be a haircutting developer when you browse upcoming games forums, when people start saying "I don't know, something doesn't feel right in the way characters are moving". And you are just reading this, dying to tell "It is the way crossfades are coded I swear, look !", but nobody would even take you seriously as this kind of detail looks like a mania to the average gamer. Just like I was having an argument on swtor forums about the huge difference between a 1.5sec and a 1sec GCD. People kept telling "lol are you serious ? 0.5 seconds is that game changing for you ?"...

 

Thing is, it can even be too smooth! look at street fighter 4 on xbox. That game blends some things, but doesn't blend other things. Sometimes there's such a thing as too much blending, and that is the art of polish in a nutshell, making all those little decisions about the small details which make or break that lush quality feel.

 

Exactly
You saw that too about SFIV, hehe

 

Unfathomable Chaos, yeah you need Unity Pro for color correction, but if someone was to create a texture that had, say, a yellow tint to it, and overlapped it over the camera. You would a yellow tint over everything, basically, and simple color correction. The thing is a lot of people don't know that making is a lot like making a movie as far as the visuals go.

hippocoder, "too smooth" would be a problem, but I've never had to worry about it or see it in person... It seems people just like things fast, because they think that the more fast action there is to a game, the better it is. They need to look at Portal and its sequel--have action scenes, but make sure the player knows where to go and its not too fast.

You have to imagine that your player is the most idiotic gamer ever and takes an hour to pass one hallway.

 

For the simple color correction, yes, you can put an overlay on your screen in Unity Free. Another way to do it is to have a plane cover the entire view of the camera and set it to be rendered last so its in seen as in front of every object. Then you can make custom shaders using SSE that can do complex color modifications to color values behind the plane.

 

Going a little off topic, how do you make it render last? That has to be something a little more advanced...

 

This is what I was thinking. Taken from: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/class-Camera.html

I hope this explains it. I haven't actually done this myself, but in theory this should work. I could be wrong though.

If you need help with layers you can also check out the layers reference: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/Layers.html

 

Yeah, I've actually tried the plane with shader in front of the camera thing, it works well if you have the free version of Unity but the pro version is just a bit more intuitive.

EDIT: Making things render last is not that hard, if I'm not mistaken. Is this what you are talking about? http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/Material-renderQueue.html

 

What is the typical way to do synced animations ingame? They look really good. For example, someone walks around to computers pressing different buttons, or a creature walks along a set path then climbs away. Is the whole level just animated together in the 3D suite? If you don't get what I'm saying, Half Life 2 is a good example. Lamar hops around the level, the animations look extremely polished and made just for that section.

 

That's what I was looking for but couldn't find. I thought I was remembering what I mentioned above incorrectly and the no clip camera trick I thought should work just as well. I suppose you would also want to make sure that the plane never clips anything, but it shouldn't if it renders last.

Thanks for finding that!

 

Many, many, many hours of just one guy going nuts and tweaking the settings and moving points around until they are perfect. It may or may not involve extra animations, usually not unless it is a "set piece" or a cut scene. Had one artist working for over three months building and tweaking nothing but trees on one game.

 

Source Engine has a pretty good animation and pathway system, how you would do this in Unity is probably with a waypoint script that stops at each waypoint until a certain trigger. Blending animations walking and voice would be a bit harder... It's basically just a lot of variables...

Actually if you put code in that says whenever the character is moving, play an animation, or whenever the character is playing audio such as voice, play a specific animation that matches the name of the audio.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. if (gameObject.audio.isPlaying())
3. animation.Play(audio.clip.name);
4.  

?

 

The way assets are laid out is often more important to me than the quality of the assets themselves. Games with huge, barren areas (usually MMORPGs) annoy me intensely, but so do game worlds which don't make sense. For example situations like guard towers with no ladder or staircase, but with loads of guards in them, or rooms entirely filled with big, empty wooden crates, whose only access is through an air vent in the roof and a manhole. Little things like that just destroy any immersion for me, particularly where the level's borders become too apparent as a result. The Elder Scrolls (for example) on the other hand do this very well, as their world feels very much like it could be lived in by it's NPC inhabitants, and I've not yet got bored enough to even try running away from the playing area to see what happens. Other than that a consistent graphical style is massively important. Minecraft would look rediculous if the player character was some beautifully modelled 30,000 poly, normal mapped vision of photographic realism against a background of cubes, as would Minecraft's pixelated swords in Assassin's Creed. These are extreme examples, but the theory holds right up to even quite similar objects (presumably including that GUI that was discussed earlier).

Well there's my opinion. I've enjoyed reading everyone else's; the importance of animation seems like a recurring theme interestingly enough.

 

Stories must be internally consistent.
Art style must be consistent.
Game rules must be internally consistent.

 

Thanks. I kind of was hoping there would be a shortcut, but hell, its game development, nothing is as easy as it looks.

 

I generally take hours tweaking the grass, usually involves editing the grayscale textures in Pixelmator and them ending up looking worse than they did.

 

How do I make my games look good? well i'm a simple guy, therefor simple graphics please me and I produce simple graphics. I like to think I pull it off :L

 

Camera shakes, and smooth, subtle camera pans relative to player movement. They make everything look boss.

 

Since Minecraft 1.8, Notch has been using changes in camera perspective to his advantage. When you sprint in Minecraft, the "FOV" changes to give a more... unnatural look...

The max "FOV" setting is called Quake Pro

Do you think Unity's camera's FOV (Field of view) settings could achieve this? Probably, but you'd need blurred edges to make it look better.

@Wolfos, your grass is greyscale? And its okay if you work on something for a while, just don't make the focus of the game the grass!

 

Some young grasshopper asked :
"How do YOU make your game look good?"

Two words.

LENS FLARES !!






YOU CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH LENS FLARES !!!!





If in doubt, LENS FLARES !



("My God, it's full of stars!")

 

^
What he said.

 

I suggest you to look in Cryengine 3 presentation video on youtube. You have everything presented there quite good how this system works. It is very similar done in Source engine too. It is quite complex it takes work on animation, placing nodes and also on AI.

 

Ah, a student of the Jeffrey Abrams school of thought I see! Now if only he'd team up with Michael Bay, just imagine how epic those explosions would look...

 

Honestly, I have found AAA game engines lately are spamming lens flares and bokeh like there is no tommrrow.


UDK (Samaritan)




UDK (Mass Effect 2 3)




CryEngine 3 (Crysis 2)



Frostbite (Battlefield 3)





If you are still not convinced. Watch Super 8 or Star Trek (2009) !!


Super 8





Star Trek





So, remember kids, you can never have enough lens flare! Put them everywhere! Put them in your sandwich, put them in your underwear, in the oven maybe even in your game! Remember, you are not a cool kid if you don't have lens flare!

 

That's deep.

Okay now for a new technique:

Particles.
Just a simple layer of dust that always moves around the character (you see this in Bootcamp).

Apparently the soldier from Bootcamp is extremely dirty and the developers felt it was necessary to enhance that.

But seriously, particles can exaggerate hits, walking, jumping, gun shots, and even swimming. Not explosions though. Whenever someone tries to use particles for an explosion it just turns out bad.

for explosions I recommend LENS FLARES

 

It's in the materials. Normal and specular maps man. Make good normal and specular maps, put them on everything and your game goes from ugly to pretty instantly. It's what makes the details look good and the shiny bits shiny.

 

Also, is it fair to say that Bloom and Glow are the most overused effects in videogame history?

Lol
but seriously, what do you recommend? It's impossible for me to make a good explosion without that fancy toolkit.

 

Its all about the lens flare tbh!

 

Actually, I wasn't joking

I made a big plane with a script that had it always look at the player, with a flare texture (included as an attachment) and had it spawn with some smoke particles. Pretty simple but decent effect. Oh and the flare must disappear before the smoke.

If you can't get an explosion you like, then go ahead and use that toolkit! (I like it too )

Actually I think that's how the toolkit does their explosions too...

 

Interesting... I might try it some time. But it seems like it wouldn't really be an explosion, more like a bang....I'm looking for an explosion explosion...but I haven't seen what it looks like yet.

 

Unity Pro helps

 

Awesome tip an uber programmer friend gave me:

When the player 'falls' off a ledge, be it 2D, 3D, FPS, third-person, side-scroller, WHATEVER... Give them a short (0.2 second, approximately) opportunity to jump before disabling it. By giving them that tiny little buffer where they can still hit jump after dropping off a ledge, the game feels far more responsive and forgiving, and you don't really break anything in the process.

 

Also, lens-flares have become their own aesthetic. They used to be considered horribly tacky by anyone IN the creative industries (thankyou, Babylon 5 and Lightwave) and awesomely sparkly by anyone on the outside. Now it's perfectly okay to use lens-flares for ambience.

Please learn why and where lens-flares occur, though.