Adding Some Visual Polish/Flare with Post-Processing!
Ultimately how much or how little you want to do with the post-processing stack is down to your personal preferences, tastes, and the kind of atmosphere you want to create in your game. With this 2D Space Shooter, we might want to aim more at realism or we might want to aim at, say, retro arcade aesthetics. This could very much change the kinds and amounts of post-processing we wish to apply to it, particularly when it comes to fairly unrealistic and/or exaggerated effects like color grading.
For me at the moment, I think I mostly just want a bit of bloom on the explosions and brighter objects within the game for some flare and ‘juice’. And to bring this out I’d like the scene to be a bit darker, particularly the background image we have. I’m generally leaning towards using red in this game, although I’m also keen on the powerup effects and their collectibles being visually distinct from each other, so I might try to bring out some more of that at some point. So as a before and after:
Again, I think I could probably afford to increase the effects in a few areas, although I am particularly happy with how that explosion and forcefield is looking (as well as the thrusters although they’re tricky to see here). To kinda wish the lasers had a it more of a glow to them, and if there’s some way I can make elements of the UI glow or seem to glow more that’d be perfect… I’ll take a bit more of a look into some of that, but this is where things are at for now 😉
