What would I need to recreate these visuals? [Trying to improve]

Hi,

I've been trying to recreate visuals of many 2D/2.5D pixel games as training for when I begin getting ideas for visuals for a game I want to make. I'm not the best at shader/after effects and am more of a code centric developer, so I'm quite a beginner in visuals.

I saw this game and am really amazed at the effects created by it: [

If someone could help answer a few questions it would really help:

1. How would I create that volumetric light seen at 0:15? All volumetric solutions I found don't work with orthographic cameras, even if I was using 3D space with my 2D sprites to create depth.
2. What is that film/mist that appears over the camera throughout the entire game? Is that a post processing effect or something else? Because it seems to move independently of the camera and isn't "stuck" to it.
3. How would I create that blur effect at 10:09 when he uses the teleport? It seems so unique.
4. How do you create emission maps with 2D sprites? You can see at 1:50 the chest he opens has a glyph that glows. I know I have to make an emission spritesheet for my sprites, but whats the methodology for that?

I was thinking of buying Amplify Shader Editor, which I think has a lot of capabilities to create effects seen in the game. Do you think it would help?

Thanks guys. I'm trying to improve my visual style knowledge and this really helps.

 

0:15 no dynamic lighting; the bg is a painting to look like that. Any bloom around the character can be achieved with just placing additive soft dot over them or cones to make light shafts on their BG layer - sure bloom post processing could be used though

10:09 is post processing 'chromatic aberration' filter

you can make this with a 3D cam using < 1.0 degree in the FoV and place things in the level closer in Zdepth to parallax the 'mist' texture is probably attached to the cam with the overall textures offset driven by the cam's lateral motion to simulate that depth

Looks like they "bloom" the screen with +blueish white when the chest is opened at 1:50 just with additive cam overlay

sprites _can_ be authored and blended using transparency in the shader to make them seem glowy and it looks like they add 2-3 particle dots to make things glow more. like those skeleton shoulders

the glyph on the treasure chest is likely it's own texture overlayed additive and they just crank the brightness with a multiply; modern PC's can handle that stuff fine

if you just want simple bloom post processing you set a thresholds for the artists so that only key'd above say 250,250,250 (in any channel) 'glows' or blooms