Hello Everyone!
As written on the title, I’m currently prototyping on replicating how Hollow Knight did their level environments. This has currently been a very different experience for me as before I tackled this project, the games I was making were top-down shooters. So I needed some benchmark to reach for my first side-scroller, and Hollow Knight came to mind with how beautiful and lively their levels were.
Here’s the level I just finished recently using this asset pack from Itch.io.
Feedback on anything with it would be greatly appreciated so that I’ll know if I’m on the right track or not on replicating their style.
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looks very nice and similar to hollow knight
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I like this a lot. It would be nice if you explained how you achieved this look and some tips and tricks you used/learned trying to recreate this iconic artstyle.
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Sure! I don’t have any concrete notes for this scene, but one of the first things I did before I opened Godot was to look up online for videos that analyzed Hollow Knight’s art style.
I believe these two videos are a great starting point and helped me immensely in figuring out how to even attempt doing this in the first place.
It looks really nice but I think the very back (vines??) Are a little bit to fast.
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Those are indeed vines. Thorny vines to be exact. And I agree they’re a little bit too fast when my intention for it was that they’re supposed to be far from the traversable area of the level and also very big.
Trying to gauge how fast distant objects should move was one of the biggest weakness of mine while making this scene. I was basically eyeballing what’s the right parallax speed for an object of X scale and the distance of the object from the traversable level.
Here’s another environment I just finished recently.
I did take some personal notes this time around compared to last time. So here are some excerpts from it that some of you might find useful.
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ParallaxLayer should ALWAYS be at 0,0 or else it won’t appear as it does inside the editor.
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Since building a scene takes a lot of repeated assets mashed together, don’t forget to take advantage of the ‘canvas_group’ 2D node for performance, as it will group up the assets into a single draw call.
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Important objects such as the computer should easily be discernible in the scene and should not be blocked by foreground or background objects.
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It is important to keep the outline of the level so that when you need to add things that are scene-size dependent, it’ll be a lot easier to implement it than having to work with a level with most if not all the assets in. An example of this is trying to implement some kind of environment fog that should only cover the entirety of the level.
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Know when to stop. When you feel like you have reached diminishing returns that adding new elements won’t improve the scene compared to the time/knowledge investment needed to do so, feel free to hit the brakes.
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This looks really amazing. I also did some exploration very similar to this here
The biggest issue I had was getting the parallax movement right, especially for long rooms with different cameras. Have you faced this issue?
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I’m glad you like it this much!
This honestly made me feel a lot better since posting this on Twitter yielded me no results. Tough crowd out there.
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Great job! I went into your thread and left a piece of advice there.
Yeah, parallax is also my biggest weakness so far when I made this, the background especially since I kept going back and forth when figuring out what’s the best parallax speed for distant objects.
Also, I haven’t encountered the issue with multiple cameras, since I only have one camera in this scene. I do have another scene that utilizes multiple phantom cameras heavily since my gameplay gimmick relies on it, but I haven’t really tried using parallax with it. Thanks for the heads-up, I’ll report back once I combine my gameplay prototype with my art prototype.
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Looking forward to seeing the result of your exploration with the multiple cameras. I also use Phantom camera, so it should be easy to apply any of your learnings.
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Yrah… Twitter can be really hard to crack.
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Twitter is a different place man.
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