The last many months I have been working on creating a complete game. During development I focussed mainly on gameplay and level design. Most parts turned out really good. I am happy about:

- gameplay

- level design

- local coop mode

- controls

- music

The game is ready to ship, however there is one major problem. After a failed greenlight campaign, I learned that the graphics are not good enough for a release.

Some notes about the graphics:

- I wanted to avoid pixel art. Every asset is drawn using vectors, and exported in high resolution.

- There is a lot of detail hidden in the game, for example the wheels of the jeep steer. Still, it feels 'too clean' and flat.

- The particle system handles debris, smoke, flames, explosions, craters and sparks. In busy levels over 30.000 particles should make it more alive. It still feels 'boring'. Why?

- The levels are dynamic and change during gameplay. Roads change. Levels are not ´drawn' images. This is nice, but it looks like a flash game. While it is c++/opengl.

- Everything moves smooth. Helicopters fly in and land and enemies do not move as they are on rails.

- The menu's are ugly...

I am definitely not an artist but a programmer. I could really use some hints on what I could do to make it visually more appealing.

Link to game page, including images, video's and download link:

https://spdr870.itch.io/operation-sheep-defense

I would say it's probably a lack of ambient occlusion type lighting. Everything looks flat and devoid of depth cues. You should also look to add stark contrasts and colorful lighting to create an atmosphere.
I think the art isn't bad, it's merely incomplete. Don't give up, keep at it!

Needs some bigger, darker shadows. (I had to look at the full size images and squint to see them.)

I would agree a bit more shadow would have the units feel less toonish and more real.

So lighting, specular lighting, better shadows and bloom should do the trick? Did some quick experiments with just lighting and basic bloom. Specular lighting is harder to implement, but I will try. Did not do the darker shadows yet. I attached two screenprints, one is at night. It is really rough, but I attempted some hdr effects. What do you think?

About the menu problem, we're going to need to see those if you want input on that. Something you could do to make your levels look better is to add a transition between the edges of the road and the terrain. Another issue is how simple the terrain is. I would highly recommend adding moderately different textures for each level. So varying types of shrubbery/grass for the green areas and perhaps more rocky/cracked patches for the more desert-like areas.

Posted some screenshots of the (embarrassing) menu's... From left to right; main menu (the sheep walks by), coop levels, second campain menu, level menu.

Basically, the visual design lacks art direction. As you said, you're not a trained artist, so the execution is naive. Basically, well, everywhere in the shots above it is possible to see opportunities for improvement.

It would be possible on the one hand to make a giant list of details to improve, but it really begs for someone to sit back and consider what a vision for this game's appearance should be doing. And from there, direct all of the specifics to meet those goals. I want to say that there's no one technical trick like ambient occlusion or shadows or more particles that will solve the underlying visual design issues, but ... well, technical tricks over artist vision has been a route done before and shipped as a product, so it could work I guess. Insert artist's rant here about how technical gimmicks can't make up for lack of artistic vision.

So the correct best answer is "hire an artist". I suspect that's off the table due to budget constraints. So I'll give you like a top 5:

• That default green on the units is really garish, please tone it down! Even just making it the green of those green trees would be better, then make the trees a bit more muted.
• You don't need black outlines on everything. Imagine if you just had black outlines on active game agents like vehicles and turrets. The dirt edges could be outlined in a slightly darker brown and it'd be much subtler and less visually noisy.
• There's no reason for the trees to be so bright and have such a range of colour; it's distracting and they have similar visual weight as tanks and things. Constrain the contrast and saturation a bit so they're more contrasty than the dirt, but way less than turrets and so on.
• Committing to going either more cartoony or more "realistic" is probably a solid plan. Right now the objects are kinda cartoony flat-shaded vector shapes while the explosions/particles/glows are "realistic" textures.
• Consider avoiding any use of grayscale that has no colour to it. There's nothing more boring than a straight gray. Asphalt can have a sepia cast to it when its covered in dust, gunmetal can have a cool tone to it, iron plates can be reddish-orange with wear and grime etc.

Okay, one more for free: What's most important is how stuff looks in the visual field of the gameplay itself. That's where you should think about if something is drawing too much attention or too little, and whether its colours work with the terrain and its neighbours or not. An asset or effect can't be truly seen in isolation!

Edit: Oh, you posted UI! A few points then:

• Doing a black line stroke inside of text is not a good thing to do, don't do it!
• Read up a bit about use of whitespace in layout design. The text I see there is all crowded up against the edges of panes as well as itself everywhere it is used, it's stressful to read and looks messier than it is.
• See that background imagine on the menus? Make your background in-game look more like that, it'd be great! It's got much subtler use of colour, a clearly chosen cartoony style, it's really promising.

Thanks dbaumgart, that is some good advise. Hiring an artist is indeed not feasible, this is a one-man side project. I think I might be able to apply your feedback, and then see what the result is. I probably go for cartoony, this will also work well for explosions I think. Maybe even replace gradients for more solid highlights.

About: "An asset or effect can't be truly seen in isolation!". Couldn't agree more, thats why I descided not to use asset packs. Those assets might look better, but out of place.

If I were you I would do some tests using real time 3D, maybe with an overhead orthographic camera with the environment and actors as live meshes.
- Animation can look smoother and more sophisticated, with more variation -- objects will actually be rotated rather than drawn as sprites.
- Using simple shaders and dynamic lighting\shadows will improve your visuals without much effort from your part. This can still work with a cartoon direction.

- The assets won't be too difficult to create. You have a few organic forms and the rest is mechanical objects, mostly segmented. These are simple to build with primitives and a little polygon modeling.

Some reference:

• Doing a black line stroke inside of text is not a good thing to do, don't do it!

What's your reasoning? Subtitles on video have a black stroke, and that's text.