Why Does Hollow Knight look like this? Recreating Hollow knights art Style

[@silverschmid4591]

0:50 this is also fitting lore wise, since the knight's parents both glow in similiar ways. (well, the pale king used to glow. he's dead now.)

[@Nonsensical2D]

For sure! Often there can be many reasons to use a specific technique or trick, most of my analysis will come from the perspective of why a technique might be used in a game. And a spotlight is fairly common and can be seen in games like Celeste or dead cells too. But naturally each game might use a technique for other reasons than I mention.

[@DustVoltrage]

It could be the other way around ;) For instance in the game I'm working on, when i have a technical requirement, I try to justify it lore wise so it feels right for the player. And you kinda turn a "problem" into a "feature" ;) ;)

[@JasonLothamer]

This is just what I needed for a game I'm currently prototyping! Thanks!

[@Vimyis]

This is a beautifully straightforward and well edited breakdown, I love your approach to analyzing visuals. You quickly made a lot of things click for me that articulate why I like Hollow Knight's design so much.

[@turkm3000]

Man you are awesome, please keep this kind of video's, very good job.

[@legrandliseurtri7495]

That was very interesting! I hope you get more attention soon.

[@Nonsensical2D]

Thank you :) I am hopeful, but at the same time, I feel like i need to improve the videomaking aspect :)

[@coderaven1107]

Great Video! Will binge your channel now!

[@Nonsensical2D]

Thank you :)

[@bluenosaurus2720]

Pls cover animation process too, great video.

[@hungryhuskygames]

How did you add the blur at 7:30? I tried messing around with the URP Depth of Field but can't get it to work on individual sprites.

[@Nonsensical2D]

It is worth noting that I am doing this in Godot, but when I Have implemented similar things in unity before, I have used essentially the same thing which is shaders. You can see my method for how I implemented it in godot in my video “2.5d parallax in the godot engine”. It is essentially just a ‘gaussian blur’-type shader that is quite performant i would say, but that wouldnt work on foreground elements (because it would blur the entire screen).

[@hungryhuskygames]

@@Nonsensical2D Thanks very much for the answer. I did some research and it is possible to do it dynamically with Unity's DoF URP for 3D projects, but unfortunately not for 2D projects, which is very strange. I will definitely look into using Shaders, since creating duplicate assets for each variant that needs to be blurred seems way to tedious.

[@quetsche]

@@hungryhuskygames you can add postprocessing effect:blur to a volume but it won't change depending on the object position :/

[@DustVoltrage]

I suppose we have to implement multiple cameras with different Post Processing Volume and set them up accordingly to different Z perspective... Not sure how costly it would be though... It's such a pain that URP doesn't work with DoF

[@greguar86]

great analysis

[@greguar86]

please analize more games like that (greak, ender lilies, spiritfarer etc)

[@Nonsensical2D]

Ye, I plan on making more of these, but they take a lot of time to do, because I first need to play through the game, then analyse it, then try and replicate it, which means the process is extremely slow. So they will come out, but with a lot of other type of content in between.

[@greguar86]

@@Nonsensical2D thats really cool. appreciate your work, really good break downs

[@CirrowProductions]

Really good dude

[@slowboatstudio]

Great video. Where can I get more info on grain filters in Godot?

[@Nonsensical2D]

At "Godotshaders" (website) you can find codes for quite a few shaders. "Thebookofshaders" (website) is another place where you can learn quite a bit on how to write shaders. Godots shading language isn't really that different from GLSL, so a lot of non-godot sources will be good for learning. As for Grain shaders, there are some really simple grain you can create by just adding a noise texture and iterating over time, like 4-5 lines of code. But you might not get the best results, regardless it would be a start and a lot of improvements would likely be in terms of making altering the noise. So if you look at godotshaders and thebookofshaders it would be able to get you like 90% there and then it would likely just be to play around with it :)

[@slowboatstudio]

@@Nonsensical2D Thanks those look like awesome resources. I even see a few examples of other things I was wondering about on there. Cheers

[@zodi4991]

How would you go about making tiles? Hollow knight uses 64x64 black tiles and cover them up with details afterwards. But when I try to do something similar, my art looks very pixelated when drawn in those boundaries of 64x64 and it isnt what im going for, just like hollow knight doesnt look pixelated, so how did they do it?

[@Nonsensical2D]

So in regards to hollow knight I think all the background and foreground elements were placed in 3D space and not on a tile map. But I would say there is no reason why you would constrain your art to be 64*64 just because your tile is, if you have a bush that looks too small as 64*64, make it cover 4 tiles and have it be 128*128. The other thing to note is that if your tile size is 64*64, you also need to make sure that your viewport is large enough (camera), so 1080/64 = 16.875, 1920/64 = 30, so you need to ensure that if your tile size is 64*64, that you have around 17 tiles visible from top to bottom, and 30 tiles spanning the horizontal axis of your screen, if you somehow have fewer than that, it will always look pixelated, because you are zoomed in. If you don't want to change the amount of tiles you have visible at that point, then you need to increase the resolution of each tile to 128x128. With this said, feel free to ask more questions in case I misunderstood. But I also have a video covering a lot of these questions about resolution, Its my most recent video called 'what size should your assets be?'.

[@zodi4991]

@@Nonsensical2D okay thank you ill look it up when I got the time. Its really hard for me to understand how hollow knight made their assets as it looks so well made and uniform as a whole. And the amount of details and little arts they make over the tiles make me think its not 64x64 like their tiles. What do you think?

[@Nonsensical2D]

You can see that a lot of it is single assets that are not made on a tiled system (I think i show a quick gif of how they structured their scene in the video, in 3d space). so they are for sure larger than 64x64, som are 512x256, some 128x128 etc. Try to achieve a similar look without worrying about the tile size first, and then you can optimize for the tile size later on. and as i said, even when you have 64x64 tiles, you can still have a sprite span multiple tiles. Good luck!

[@zodi4991]

@@Nonsensical2D Yes that make sense thanks a lot. Lets take tiny sprites like flowers in caves and such, do you think they make it this size or make it much bigger as you said and then scale it down to fit?

[@Nonsensical2D]

I mention this a bit in my most recent video, but I think it can be generally good to make the sprite about twice as big as you need it, since you can scale it down, and when you are starting out, you might even be unsure how big or small you want it, so making it a bit too big and then exporting it smaller when necessary for performance tends to be the better way to go about it. and you get into even more situations where you might need large versions of the bushes for the times the sprite is in the foreground, but smaller versions for when they are in the background, so creating the sprite for the largest possible use case generally pays off in the long run. Whether they (team cherry) always did this or not can be hard to say, but I would generally say that it isn't beneficial to copy the process by which a company like team cherry made hollow knight, it can be more important to focus on emulating the things that you like. They might very well have used procedures and sprite sheets in a way that was necessary in 2015, but isn't as important nowadays.

[@Shadowthevampire]

google claims the main character sprite in hollow knight is only 128x128 in size but how come when I draw my character 256x256 he looks super pixelated ? Ieven use the monoline brush... I use procreate just like you and from my understanding your assets are small in you're own game aswell with your mushroom dude character? but they still look so crips.... I tried doing the "measure you're screen make it look roughly 1/10 of the screen"-etc thing you said in another video but it doesn't work...Am I using the wrong color profile or since you use uniy do you do some special magic powow thing inside of unity to make them look HD in there?

[@Nonsensical2D]

Hmm, I use Godot, but even so there can be settings that can be problematic. You might have some import settings such as Sizelimit/compression/mipmaps/filters that cause unwanted behaviour, so playing around with import settings could be helpful. If not, rather than focusing on an actual size like 256x256, draw the sprite in a resolution that is way over the top, like 2k x 2k, and then import several versions of the same character, each in different size, and see at what point it looks crisp.

[@Shadowthevampire]

@@Nonsensical2D It dosent even look crisp while drawing it inside procreate as it seems to do for you when I've seen you draw things. Also you use Godot? I could've sword you used Unity. Great we use the same engine and tools! Then why can't I get it to work x"D Yeah I did switch to drawing them bigger now I'm just scared like...wil kit make a computer lagg or overheat? And if I make my avatar 1000x1000 how...do I make him the right size later on? Do I rescake him somehow inside of unity? And when it comes to sprite sheet what do I do then with so large assets? I started making my character in 1000x1000 and everything else in 500x500 I have no clue if those sizes are good tho. I'm making a Farming Rpg so there will be allot of trees rocks debris and farming plots I wonder if such large sprites will lagg :/? It be super helpful at some point if you could film your process like from procreate into Godot like all steps you take like deciding a size fir an asset, drawing that asset, scaling the asset, putting it into/creating sprite sheets, importing it into Godot etc and what aspect ratio and resokution etc.. so I and others can understand how your art looks so crisp.

[@Nonsensical2D]

@@Shadowthevampire hmm, the reason I think you could try and make it larger is because you can set the scaling on import or export anyway. my character is drawn in a 4k document, because I use it in videos anyway. As for crispness, I don't know the size of your monitor, but if you are doing 1080p on a 32/27 inch, it won't look that crisp no matter how you do it. I could potentially look into making a video about this stuff, but it will have to be a while, I have quite a lot of videos I'm working on already. If your computer would lag, then you scale down. but I don't think you should over-optimize if you don't have to.

[@cM4rk0]

Nice videos overall. I was wondering how did you apply the blur effect to the background only? I am asking this under assumption that you used unity and post processing instead of godot. :)

[@Nonsensical2D]

I'm using godot and a shader, I have implemented something similar in unity a long time ago, but used a shader there as well.

[@cM4rk0]

@@Nonsensical2D Thank you very much, I've been losing my mind trying to figure out UPR+post processing in unity. I hope I can figure out shaders :D Again I must say, great channel overall, big thanks for content you provide.

[@guille_sanchez]

@@Nonsensical2D First of all, excellent video! I would like to ask more in detail about how you get the blur shader to work in Unity because I've tried a lot of stuff but don't work as expected. Could you elaborate a little bit as to what shader you used specifically and how you got it to work? I appreciate your work!

[@chem-z9718]

​@@cM4rk0if you still need it/for those who may need it in the future: Thomas Brush has a video on the same topic, but with an implementation in Unity and with somewhat different key points. It may be useful to also watch that one.

[@LethalChicken77]

Can you provide the blurring shader you used?

[@Nonsensical2D]

It is the blur shader provided in the godot docs (I use godot). I have it written out in my video called 2.5D parallax in godot 2d engine. It is basically just one line of code and should be possible to use a similar one in unity or other engines.

[@blackheartgaming6121]

Hope they make a show of this game like they did for cuphead

[@Nonsensical2D]

I actually haven't watched the cuphead series yet, but I am intending to, is it any good?

[@blackheartgaming6121]

@@Nonsensical2D haven’t seen it yet but will some day lol

[@felipemendes7104]

great video thanks

[@Nonsensical2D]

Thanks :) I appreciate it

[@seanmax8762]

How did you achieve the dark fadeout at the right side of the scene? Did you use a shader, or maybe a blurred black sprite? Great video anyways!

[@Nonsensical2D]

In this case it was just a blurred black sprite, seemed the easiest :)

[@seanmax8762]

@@Nonsensical2D Ahh alright, thanks for the reply!

[@casedistorted]

Yikes, bit of a spoiler having that guy right off the bat following the main character.. I have not gotten that far yet and had no idea that was in the game. Now I do 😰🤦‍♂️ never seen another video without a spoiler tag showing that little guy.

[@Nonsensical2D]

Sorry, that little guy has no bearing on the story though, it’s just a charm you can have equipped just like anything else (completely unrelated to the main storyline) , I didn’t really think about it as a spoiler, but I’m sorry for not unequipping it.

[@casedistorted]

@@Nonsensical2D Phew, no worries. I saw it in another video shortly after too in a video that showed one of the DLC's, and I assume it is not part of the base game but something else added later? I appreciate explaining it to me like that, I was completely baffled when I saw it like "WTH is that ??" but that makes me feel a bit better, I have just finished fighting the Mantis Lords boss fight so I am early on I think. I'll make sure to come back and watch the rest of your video after I get further in the game, just in case lol

[@Gatitasecsii]

So you DID talk about it eventually... Yeah seems like not many people recognize this, and sort of shame artists who actually put effort into their art for not looking as well animated as this, while also not knowing how absolutely absurdly simple hollow knight is. Not to say it's a bad thing, but I'm sure you'll find people who will trash on your game because the animations don't flow as well as hollow knight's because you put more detail on your character's pants. I hope you end up shortening the rear leg of your character in the running animation (in every frame a leg is extended back it always looks off model).

[@Nonsensical2D]

Haha, you are probably the first person to comment on it, I haven't had anyone comment on the eye of the mushroom being slightly misplaced either. Ye, I'm aware of some errors with the animation, I don't have a jumping animation either, and am slowly working on fixing both things, but animation is one of those things that is difficult to do and kind of takes time for me :)