How I made my game look like a comic book! | Alien Frontier Devlog #0

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Alien Frontier is an open world, third-person shooter roguelite! This devlog covers the first six months of development on my game, made in Unreal Engine 5! This devlog focuses on introducing my game and also touches on how I was able to cover so much ground in only half a year.
Music - See you Soon - Otis McDonald • See you Soon
#unrealengine #unrealengine5 #gamedev #indiegame #devlog #gamedevelopment #roguelike

[@shahshah1]

Thanks for doing this, like 50% went over my head but I appreciate the clarity. I'm just starting on my game dev journey but this was inspiring! I love the graphics of your game, its giving me cartoon nostalgia

[@KhalilArafan]

Solid Omni Man Vibes :) Best of luck, looking glorious !

[@guillermomontoya3382]

Awesome game man! It really looks beautiful. Certainly, I'll be expecting a full length tutorial of this shader

[@whoeverofhowevermany]

Why does this feel more like a video essay about stylized graphics than a devlog?

[@shibii]

Oh god, that is exactly the style I was looking for (more or less since I want to use it in a totally different way) and I was talking to my girlfriend about Moebius for the same exact reasons like... 2 weeks ago lol! it's really nice to see a proof of concept and see that what I had in mind could be achieved! Good job and good luck on the rest of your journey :)

[@kairu_b]

Beautiful outlines

[@shaugrithshaugrith-kq3zs]

also like the shader is so nice and fits so good with the color scheme

[@bobbobert4726]

Very cool video - I love the style. Could you talk about your asset pipeline? It is very hard to find info on how people actually make stuff like your character and import it into UE.

[@crusatyr1452]

Omg I saw a Useless Game Dev video on this same topic earlier this year. I love to compare the different approaches!

[@drekenproductions]

looks good

[@slaughtercats]

congrats looking good

[@Brosquini]

This game looks so great! I love the visual style, and everything about it, although you must add some impact to shooting, like screenshake, a puff of smoke when the bullet leaves the barrel and a recoil animation from the gun arm thing. This would make the shooting look and feel much better!

[@AfterHoursGames]

Thank you for the comment! I'll experiment with some screen shake and hopefully include it in the demo build.

[@messiboy3358]

Cough cough Battlebit

[@alexlisovets5942]

looks cool, reminds me of retro space comics. COuld be cool if you could add these funny rockets and small guns) Could you make a video of how you accomplished different vfx in your game? One that would interest me the most is on second 0:08, the dash effect

[@AfterHoursGames]

Sure, in a future video I'll explain it!

[@quinnpurcell]

Amazing breakdown of your materials and process! Have you noticed if having the post processing materials optimizes the game at all? I know Unreal can be quite a GPU beast out of the box…

[@AfterHoursGames]

It's a bit of a complicated answer: objectively, post processing materials have a performance cost. Mine is a bit heavy since it's doing a lot of work, so if I were to disable it, the game would run a little bit better. However, since the post process material is so transformative, I'm able to use lower fidelity assets, lower quality textures and lighting etc. So in that regard the rest of my game is super cheap, so it's a net win.

[@lzyaez]

I love the style and I would like to recreate it in my Unity game. Do you know how to achieve the same effect in unity with the shading and outline? I've watched some tutorials but none of them looks this good and the implementations they give are very finnicky or require specific project setup that clashes with my current project's one.

[@shaugrithshaugrith-kq3zs]

it looks so damn good like rlly especially bc i havent seen mayn games having a such artstyle (not 3d games) and if then it usually sucks haha but yours looks os damn good keep it up

[@AfterHoursGames]

Hey, thanks so much for the kind words!

[@shaunramkelawon]

well explained! love your game and the style 👌

[@AfterHoursGames]

Thank you!

[@lennysmileyface]

I have been trying to find a way to have the outline style where distant objects like leaves don't just become black blobs. How did you do the trees? I'd pay for that shader if you put it on the marketplace.

[@Prrt-rq3ym]

I was working on endless world generation lately for a fun project and so I was wondering If you are using straight fractal noise for your terrain? It looks very similar from what I had at first (shapewise). I found that I could make the landscape much more interesting by combining different noise layers like this : fracNoise1 * fracNoise2 + fracNoise3 the first fractal noise layer has a really large scale so it decides where mountains can be, the second layer than is the general mountain shape while the third layer adds details I am also overlaying curves on each layer which modify the values when they are in fixed intervals that way you can even make river like canyons (with a lot of fiddling around). I was going after the minecraft approach explained in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eYTEZoJsoNOoras (starting at minute 16). Maybe this helps and can give you some ideas. Because at the moment your landscape looks kind of repetitive EDIT.: It looks absolutely beautiful. Really impressive what you did so far I just try to give some useful feedback, I did not meant to sound so critical

[@SombreroMan716]

Not sure if you are aware, but another KZbinr, Useless Game Dev, created a very similar shader based off of Möbius’s ideas.

[@Sharkfurter]

I honestly am not a big fan of the artstyle of Alien Frontier. The game as a whole is very very flat due to the lack of "depth". If you look at any "comic book" inspired or "drawn" inspired game, there's a heavy emphasis on things like shadows and shading in general, visible pencil strokes, emphasized animations, etc. Mobius can get away with this not only because it's a still image, but also because of the composition of the artwork. You also drew attention to the thick outlines of Mobius, but comparatively, the outlines in Alien Frontier are small. Whenever everything has the same bright vibrant colors, with small outlines, and minimal lighting, it causes the moving image to just blend together into a bunch of meh. I'd really recommend making outlines maybe twice as thick, so objects that are in the foreground vs background stick out and they look more like "drawn" things. If you're going to do a cartoony look, then you shouldn't have realistic shadows, because they don't stand out and look very boring. You mention not wanting to add outlines to smoke, but why wouldn't you? You don't want the smoke to look photo real and contrast with the assets around it. Because you have manually added shadows, why shouldn't they be as vibrant and exaggerated as the other colors? To fit that comic-y artstyle, try making them a deep, solid black that fades, or alternatively, make them look crosshatched or like comic dots. The shadows look way better when you darkened them in this video. You could also look into adding another layer of post processing to your models by using comic dots to highlight certain areas of textures/models. The animations in this are also very weak and lacking impact, which I figure is probably due to the early state of the game. I'd definitely go hunting for some "action" animation packs, because there's mo-cap animation packs out there for all the stuff featured in this; flying, riding a board, etc. Then, depending on how advanced you are in 3D animation, you could add some squash and stretch to these animations to make them more cartoony. Additional touches would just be post processing and extra effects, like puffs cartoony puffs of smoke and explosions, speed lines, impact waves, etc. Just my two cents. I don't want to tear down your hard work, and I know that it's still a WIP so many things will change. You're doing a great job for a solo dev so far.

[@garrotcastongvay8382]

💦 'Promosm'

[@diligencehumility6971]

If it's all about the looks, why is Minecraft the most downloaded game, and why is Stardew Valley so popular. The truth is, if your game is good, graphics doesn't matter

[@paletreker]

game looks great! is there any way to contact you directly? work email or something?