How to make my game looks good?

Hello everybody, I'm Edgar
This is a transcription to english of my first publish on my blog, it's a hard question to answer, and most of developers don't know how to answer, so today, I'm going to give you information that can help you with this,

Now, it doesn't matter on what engine are you, since this is more theory and you can apply it on the way you like.

Before I start, I would like to explain that there are two things on what we will base all:
- Atmosphere.
- Effects.



The atmosphere is the amount of objects that we put in an scene, they have to match in style, that way, they will give us the feeling of the place and be immersive, if we see Half life 2, it use this greatly, every prop, every little model have a well position in the map, for example, if we take a look to City 17, se can see bricks, bottles, food containers, and other objects that are well placed to let us know that we are in a dark city, and the atmosphere let us see it through things around us.

The effects are something different, there are shaders that let you get a effect like the antialiasing, effet that difusses the corners, letting that all can see more clean and smooth.

To archieve a good loking game, we don't need only camera effects, we need a good atmosphere, and the atmosphere can come in a lot of ways, ilumination, level desing, objects, 3D models and others.

One of the things that we could do to have a better visual quality, it's adding props, this objects will help you to bring life to our game, if we are in a city, the city can't be totally clean, you can see bottles, cans, papers, trash bags, and others, and we can add these models, but, we have to be careful, the models can't have a lot of polys, otherwise, we will reduce the performance of our game, they actually don't have to be excesive detailed.

We got also textures, and texture variables, such as the specular, normal, displacement or occlusion maps, they let help us to add a lot of details without the use of excesive resources, for example, the normal map, can add details and change the surface, giving a great look

The illumination plays an important role, it can highlight places of the escenes or objects, this will make it believable and give it life, but the way of use can make it better or worse, it cn damage the things you got, the way of use depends of the genre and have to be careful.

And last but not least, the particles, they can add a great effect, you can make dust, leaves, papers and others, many people say that more it's better, but this doesn't apply always, and less if you are going to focus them on a point, you have to know how to distribute them through the environment.

Now, talking about effects, we can talk of Bloom, Antialiasing, Depth of Field, and others, they can help us to give effects to our escena, using a considerable amount of resources, if they are well implemented, we can archieve a great look, but if we use them incorrectly, the game would be saturated of effects and can hurt the vision, we have to know where and how to use them and don't add them all of them at the same time, because the result could be unfavorable.

We start with one of the most used effects recently, the depth of field, as the name says, this effect focus places, ranges or objects and adds a effect of diffuse on the unfocused parts, we have seen this effects commonly on movies, this forces the player to see to the enfocated parts of the escene

Later, we move on with the HDR, effect that is similar to Bloom, but Bloom it's a old generation effect, but can still used, the HDR, take example of the human vision, that can adapt to the lights change, this can give us an epic touch on our escene

We got other effect called Ambient Occlusion, this dim the borders or curves to give a light fading effect, this give us great looks and makes the curves of the objects more notable, there are a lot of types of Occlusion, but I prefer to talk about the Ambient and in a general way.

One of the oldest and better effects is the antialiasing, this effect difusses the curves and quit a blurriness and make give a great looking to our escene, making it visually agradable, there are a lot of types of antialiasing and ways to apply it, but I think that is not need to talk of them and give example of them, because there are at least 3 types of them.

Now we know a lot of thing that we can use to make a better escene, with better effects and a great look, this is only general information and you can look for detailed information about effects, environment by yourself, I hope that you like this and this can help you.

BTW! I have a new blog, it's codedgar.com.ve
It's mainly in spanish, but I will upload things in english soon :D