How was this game made?

[Mike1409]

This game looks fantastic. I am a huge fan of this type of graphics although I am not really sure how this 3D render style is called.
I have been trying pretty intensely to figure out how this game was made and how did the developers managed to achieve these results when it comes to shading and texturing but I couldn't find any info (not even what engine they used).
If anyone can share some information it will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

[Prawnpaws]

I believe this look is called "Cel Shading" sometimes also known as toon shading. Google those terms.

[guiLe]

For lighting essentially you use a smoothstep to essentially say 'you're either this brightness, or that brightness'. This creates a banding effect - I think Sable had only 1 band, but you could add more. This is an extremely common technique, many visual shaders exist for it in Blender and glsl/hlsl shaders are also abundant for it. Most likely one directional light is used.

For the edging lines you would do this in post processing. Generally you can detect edges in three ways in post: color, depth, and normals. Usually depth and normal give the best results but I think all three were used here, to some degree at least.

For the line details that arn't done in post, like the details on surfaces I would have thought a simple overlay texture (you would have to account for this in post processing by not factoring color into edge detection if the color is black) but I noticed a surface where the line details were suffering from z-fighting so they are probably decals. Could get more complicated with extra viewports but I can't be sure.

Some parts had different colors based on distance - I noticed the balloon changed when I got closer. I'd guess this is just a simple case of finding the distance (squared, probably) from the camera and shading accordingly.

Ultimately though with shader and post processing you can really go wild depending on your needs. Sometimes a seemingly simple details requires an unusual setup but the player will never know. It'll be something like I have described.

As for naming it, I would go with toon shading since that's the term I've seen most. It does seem like they went out of their way to adopt some almost comic book like approaches though.