The main thing If I ' m seeing it correctly on the buildings at least is that there ' s some good use of shaders in the image posted . The buildings and characters seem to have a slight outline shader that seems to provide the slightly dark border to those objects , making them pop against the background . Secondly , I think there ' s some Physically Based Rendering PBR going on in this game as well , a good article to read on this is here t h e o r y o fphysicallybasedrendering . This in conjunction with the use of normal maps a calculation how light will behave on a textured surface without modelling the geomtery , read more here makes everything look quite pretty . I ' m sure there ' re are things I ' ve missed but that seems to be the main stuff being used to prettify the game , though bear in mind PBR costs a lot in terms of performance . If you haven ' t done shader programming specifically look at Unity ' s guide on their standard shaders and play with those to get an idea of waht you may want to do .