Hello DevForum! I was wondering how people add detail to cartoonish cities? My developer team has been working on a game and it looks too minimal, doesn’t look refined, and looks messy.
We are supposed to release it next week and I am worried that our game visuals will be too bad to play the game.
We want our game to have a cartoonish look. Here are some images, but what strategies do you use to add clutter and fill in spaces in? What can we do to make our game look less bland and less “eye-straining”?
Park - Make the terrain not as flat, add some bushes, and perhaps some structures. For example, there could be a benches, trashcans, and stones. In addition, there could be some patches of vegetation such as grass, flowers, and leaf piles. To top it off, some wandering animals could help build up atmosphere with gushes of wind.
Bank exterior - There could be some stone designs and decorations on the ground, such as pebbles. The statue in the middle could have more designs than just being 3 cylinders to give it a more chiseled design.
Streets - Some variety to the buildings would be nice. The houses could look better with some more designs than just being a square with windows and a door.
Office - It looks quite nice but it would be nice if the computer set ups didn’t look so similar in terms of coffee cup placement. This can be resolved by not having coffee cups in each office compartment. It might also be nice to have some potted plants around.
Bank interior vault - Some piles of cash might be good. The bank could perhaps have some some more supports and outward designs.
Store - It might be nice to have some more display shelves, racks, etc.
Start adding props and other stuff to “empty” areas. For example in the office area you could include one of those coffee carts, some posters related to the buisness or some motivational ones instead, include some extra doors with rooms like bathrooms, some vegetation like plants inside pots and etc.
The outside area of the bank should have a bit more benches, maybe tiled bricks as the floor, have some vehicles parked at the sides, some trees just like the ones you usually find in the sidewalks, some electricity poles with some of them having posters stapled at them and etc.
Take screenshots of your city or look at your city via google maps to take references of how the average areas look like so you can make something like that. It will help you a lot including more detail than what you were going to add without having a reference.
After that try to use a darker colour pallete because i cannot imagine playing your game at the middle of the night, because it would probally melt my eyes because of how bright it is. Enable global shadows too, so it won’t be 100% bright. Lower down the ambient to something gray-ish
