It’s basically following the rule of thirds and when you’ve got your head around it, it’s relatively simple. It takes a while to kind of get it working well, but over time you will naturally start composing things with the rule of thirds in mind. Pretty much everything in mind follows the rule of the thirds to a degree, and I think that really helps when you’re showing an image. Due to all of the photography I’ve done, I’m able to tell what looks good because I’ve got an eye for composition anyway.

I think that drawing from other disciplines like photography, cinematography, and etcetera can really help your work with making games. In particular, I would say with cutscenes. If you just want to show off your work, don’t just take a screenshot. You should pose the camera angle and tweak things to get it just right to look good.

It’s all about composition and often less can be more. You don’t want to overload the viewer with tons and tons of assets in a scene. First of all it would take ages to render and it would hurt the frame rate if you have loads of stuff. It would take forever to bake with GI and so on.

I would suggest for people that are just getting into it to just start with 3 or 4 different things in a scene and just play about with the camera angle and the composition off that. I think that’s a great place to start. Then you can play with the visual effects on the camera with just a few things and see what kind of emotions you can invoke from just a few assets by changing the colors whether it’s daylight to nighttime, or color grading (making everything warm and pleasant, or cold).

It’s just playing around with a few things and seeing what you can do with that.

The Advantages of Stylized Visuals