Shaders: Stylizing Beat Dragon!

Stylizing Beat Dragon!

    Our game is called Beat Dragon, which is an aerial-rhythm game.  You play as Jiggy, the musically enchanted dragon, who collects symbols representing different attacks (wings, your tail and clapping).  Each attack creates different sounds, which in total create a song.  You want to hit these attacks, which keep up your flow (health) and reach the end of the level.  At the end of each level, you combat a boss.

Before:

    At the end of last semester, our game currently looked like the following:

    As you can see, this is a basic prototype of the game, with not much in the way of shaders or special effects.  It has flat colours, and a pure black background.  

After:

After some work in photoshop, I managed to turn another screenshot of the game into what you see below:

    The first thing I did was put water and clouds into the background.  After that I started adding some special effects.  I burned in some texture to the canyon walls on either side, to give the walls more of a rocky feeling.  I then created shadows for Jiggy, the giant dragon, the canyon walls, and the clouds in the water's surface.  After that, I added some shadows on the giant dragon to accentuate and make it pop.  I then added a film grain to the entire screenshot, to give it a lighter feel.  Finally, I added a lens flare, for the reflection of the sun in the water and it's light bouncing off of the surface and catching the player's eye.  All in all, I felt this gave the game a much lighter and joyful feel to it, something which is what we are aiming for in our finished game.