How To Make A Horror Game (Fast, No Modeling)

It's totally possible to create a convincing double A or even triple A looking horror game with completely royalty-free assets. And here's the kicker, no modeling. Instead of just telling you about this, I'm just going to show you. I'm going to do this live, and I'm going to sit down inside of Unity and create this beautiful, horrifying, kind of Resident Evil Requiem inspired environment. [music] Keep in mind, I'm going to use ProBuilder. Now, ProBuilder is technically 3D modeling, but not really because it's really simple 3D block out, and it's free inside of Unity's package manager. If you don't want to do any of this yourself, you don't have to. The link is below for all of the models that I create with ProBuilder. Also, all the other royalty-free assets that I use and the textures, they're all linked below as well. Feel free to check those out. The first thing I want to do here is just build a general level layout. I'm going to hit play just to show you guys really quick. This is what we've got. Right now, I'm not sure which assets we're going to use, but this is all we've got. You'll notice I've got a nice UV unwrap. This is ProBuilder. It's just got a simple 1080 by 1080 texture on it.

And I've got these pieces here. These are all prefabs, and I'm going to be able to snap these to various portions of the ProBuilder mesh. I can go ahead and go to ProBuilder here, and I can start pushing and creating hallways out of this. So, let's just have some fun here. I'm going to select all of these. So, I'm going to hold shift and pull, and you can see here it's starting to push at the grid of 1 by 1. Now, you notice the UV is screwed up. We can clean that up quickly. I'll show you how we're going to do that, but I'm just going to push and push and push. And I want nice clean squares here. That way we're sure about the various sizes. And if I want to put a door here, I can delete this and then just drag the door piece over and snap it there. Does that make sense? But let's keep going here. What we don't want to do here is we don't want to hold shift and then just do this cuz then I can't cut out a grid piece to snap in my doors and my windows. So far, so good? Awesome. Okay, let's maybe put a door here or a window here. And we'll make it a little bit longer, and then we'll do a T-shape on both sides.

Okay, let's hit play and feel it out. So, there's a living room in here. Maybe we'll put a little window there or something. I don't know. Something over here. Okay, let's give us a little bit more room to walk. All right. So, we have our level. Now, the next question is, okay, well, how do we make it look pretty using assets? Well, before we do that, we want to put our windows and our doors to make it feel like an actual, you know, building. And so, here's how we do that. Now that I know that I'm using a set grid of one Unity meter, I also know that these pieces are confined perfectly to that size. I'm going to go ahead and edit out that part of the mesh. Right-click, delete faces, and it should be, please God, we should not see any weird Z-fighting or anything like that cuz it's snapped perfectly and we're using a perfect grid. So, now already you can imagine, oh, this is how Half-Life 2 was made. This is how Twisted Tower was

made. Now, you got to be careful because it the game can feel like Wolfenstein if you don't set dress it properly and use angled arches and really go in and set dress this. But overall, this is ba- the basics of level design using a grid and then slowly putting in prefabbed pieces that are modular. In fact, let's go ahead really quickly before we do this, guys. What you want to make sure you do is you want to make sure you get all of your UVs perfectly unwrapped. So, I'm going to go back in time, keep all this. I'm going to select everything, and then I'm going to go to Uh, where is it? Tools, ProBuilder, editors, UV editor. I'm going to open that up, bring that over here, convert auto here, and then I can go to uh is it 4 by 4? Let's double-check. That should do it. Okay, yeah. Select all of it. I'm going to go 1 by 1. There we go. Good. Okay, the unwrap is perfect now. It should be. Before I start deleting faces, I want to be I want to go ahead and put my trim in. The reason I want to put my trim in is because if I start deleting faces, I'm not going to be able to create edge loops. So, I want to make sure I can create my edge loops now. So, I'm going to create an edge loop up

here. I'm going to select this edge. I'm going to make sure I'm set to 0.1 for my grid snapping, and I'm going to go to insert edge loop, and now I have an edge loop around the entire freaking thing, and I can just pull it up to this point here and then bring it down by one. I think going down to 0.2 is probably good. We'll do the same down here. Right-click, insert edge loop. And so, we're just going to add some trim here as well at the same size, 0.2. I'm going to select the face here, right-click, and I'm going to do a select the the I believe the loop. I'm going to put on a new color just so I know what the trim looks like. And when I go in and drag in a new material or a texture, that's just going to just appear there. I'm going to do gray here as well. Already, you can see how it's starting to look like an actual building. Starting to feel like a real place. All right. So, that looks awesome.

Looking good so far. Okay, we need some textures. We need some wall textures, we need some trim textures, we need some floor textures, and we need we need [clears throat] some ceiling textures. And by the way, I'm going to use illegal assets right now, and what I mean is I'm going to just Google them, and I'm just going to do that just for now just so I can get them placed throughout the scene. In just a minute though, I'm going to use real royalty-free legal ones and also take some photos from my iPhone and create some textures that way as well. But let's just use some illegal ones right now just to get it placed in the scene. So, this right here is the the texture for this. It is a PSD file. I'm not exporting it as a PNG. I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to find old plaster texture. Actually, let's do Victorian wallpaper. And I'm going to find one that's not too aggressive. So, there's our texture here. We're going to snap it to the top here and drag it down. None of these are going to be like tiling perfectly. I'll we'll do that

later. I believe, as long as hidden is turned off, if I select all this, I should be able to just Yes, I can change the material for the ceiling. So, I'm going to create a new UV really quick. I'm going to call this one like green. And then if I just do the ceiling portion here, that should just do the ceilings. Yay. And then we'll also do the floors. So, I'm going to select all that, and then I'm going to do blue. Yeah. Yeah, let's go ahead and bring in our wallpaper. And we're going to go in and and colorize all these and make them look really pretty and cool. But you're going to have something like this. Motion blur 90. There we go. Something like that. And if you get situations where you're like, I hate that, you know, then what you do is you say, okay, well, we'll do this. And hopefully that'll resolve most of those weird issues. And I know what you're thinking. It's like, that looks really bad. Hold your horses. We're just getting all of the textures assigned. We haven't done any set dressing, any lighting. We haven't even done any real texture work. We're just getting our general textures in. Okay, we have our ceiling here. Let's go ahead and find some plaster for our ceiling.

Oh, we need floor. I think a hardwood floor would be really cool. So, let's do that. So, so far, we have our base layer done for our 3D game, our 3D horror environment. Believe it or not, this is what we need. This is what we need. It looks very, very rudimentary, but this is what you want. So, now let's go ahead and figure out the color scheme so that we can colorize and adjust our textures. I think overall, all we really want to do is sort of just grayish tones, grays and browns. So, I'm What I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a new document here, and this is just going to be our color, our our very clean color palette that we're going to use. I don't I don't really have an issue

with these colors. So, I'm going to save this as our color scheme, and this is super duper important because this color scheme we're going to use to unify all of our textures. Let's go ahead and add a point light in here so we can start to see how things are looking. I'm going to make the skybox look black outside. Yeah, we need a new skybox. So, let's create a new skybox. This is our going to be our storm cloud skybox. I'm going to drag it on in. Here we go. This is going to be a panoramic skybox, and it's just going to be dark. That's all we want for now. Let's go ahead add a point light in cuz I just want to start to be able to see how the colors look in the lighting that we're going to be using. Add a point light in here. Let's pretend it's coming from the ceiling. There we go. Crank up the intensity here, and we're going to do a just a subtle warm color. And what you want to do with your lights is you want to make sure that you have a standard light color you're using all the time. Now, you're probably thinking, man, it looks so bland still. Well, that's because we have ambient lighting on. I'm going to turn that off. See what a difference that makes? So, now I can

start to see, okay, this is this is what's going on. This is what our world looks like. The skybox should be black, and I'm just not seeing it. I think what we want to do is I want to go ahead and and get a skybox going, a stormy skybox with like trees in the distance cuz it's it's going to be really hard for me to know if these colors are working if I can't look out those windows and see a skybox. So, let's go ahead go ahead and create a skybox. There it is. Boom. And then we're just going to set it to white or gray. That way, if I go in here, I can take a look. I'm going to remove the glass actually for now. I just want to see through the skybox, and I'm going to darken the crap out of this. It's almost midnight, you know. There we go. All right. So, now it's getting a little bit creepier. I like it. I like it. Good. Good. Good. Now, we have this is going to be our fluorescent point light. We can duplicate this and call this night sky point light. And I can just drag this one in here and have a night sky one about right here and it's going to

be that night sky color and it's going to be very subtle. There we go. So, I can put one here. Guys, we don't even have specular information. We don't have any specular, we don't have any set dressing and it's already feeling so good. Look at that. A lot of you are like, "Well, Thomas, I want to I want to use legal assets cuz I want to know if I can make a a game for free and legally and sell it." And so, I thought about it and I was like, "You know what? Let's let's do that really quick." There are two options available to us and and we're going to just really quickly reskin these. Take pictures with your iPhone of various elements throughout your house or go out, take pictures of stuff. So, I went out to breakfast with my daughter today and I took a picture of the floor cuz I loved the wood floor. And so, let's do that. Let's go ahead and really quickly incorporate that wood floor here. All right, so there's our new hardwood floors, right? Looks good to me. And we're going to get it to loop properly and also not look like it's a bunch of um different colors.

There it is. Yay! So, that looks awesome. Let's do one more photo. This one is a door. Okay, so this this door is completely illegal. I cannot use this door. So, what do I do? Well, just take a picture of a door in your house. Okay, there we go. Looks good to me, man, but let's go ahead and do the specular for the floor, okay? There is a program called Materialize. It's an old program, but I'm going to go ahead and use it to create our normal maps and our roughness maps and height maps and all that for our wood floors. You got to start with the diffuse and we're going to click the O for open and I'm going to go to my desktop here and hopefully I can grab our wood floor here. This is the wood floor we created. We like this wood floor. It's finalized. So, what I can do is starting from the left, it's going to try and auto create all of the different textures here. So, this one I'm going to click click create click create and it's going to try and create a height map. So, it's showing me the height map here. It looks fine. We need a height map in order to create a normal map. So, now I'm going to create my normal map. Looks

pretty good. Going to set that. Metallic map, we're not going to use it, but we're going to create it. Uh smoothness map, we're going to create. Yeah, we can adjust that in Unity, but that's going to work just fine. We have a normal map now. We have a height map. We have some smoothness information and we can adjust this as we want. It's not perfect, but it will be, promise. The reason why this is beneficial as opposed to Photoshop is it's creating a normal map based on the height map based on a single diffuse. So, this is great for stuff like wood floors. So, I've got my wood floor. Um I'm going to bring in I'm going to drag this actually to that folder there. There we go. I've got my normal map and then I've got my floor, my my standard defeat my diffuse or my albedo. And I'm going to go to my wood floor here to the texture. I'm sorry, the the material. I'm going to drag in that normal map. It's going to tell me it's broken. I'm going to click fix. There we go. I'm also going to go to the albedo and increase the shininess here. And we definitely need a reflection probe. We definitely definitely need a reflection probe. There we go. So, we have gray. I'm going to hit bake, but I

I doubt that it's going to bake quickly, but we're going to bake it anyway. So, it's baking the skybox information. That actually helped us a lot. Okay, that's good. Okay, um and our specular is fine. Our normal map, it looks like we might need to invert it if I'm being honest. Yeah, there we go. And the shininess looks good. Now that we've got that looking good, we've got windows, we've got the frame. We can go ahead and start throwing in assets. We're going to start with ceiling lights and I have all the assets I need in my asset bin. Let's actually start with the coffee table. The way I like to handle assets is I want them to be the bare minimum I want the textures to be PSDs. And we're going to create prefabs out of all of these and we're going to make sure they're sized properly and that way we can use them over and over and over again in our game. So, this is our table. If I select the mesh, it'll tell me where my textures are. There's the texture. We're going to go to material table 50, drag it on there. Is that really our table? That can't be it. Okay, apparently we have a table that I

really like, but it's this disgusting marble. I'm going to use this, but we're going to make it look like wood cuz I hate that. That that does not match the environment at all. So, what we're going to do is we're going to think, "Okay, how would a table be made? Like this kind of table?" Well, it'd probably be a slab of wood. I think I have a texture for that. I actually took a picture this morning of just wood. There we go. All right, let's take a look. All right, we're getting there. Pretty good, man. I don't hate it. Good enough for me. That works for me, y'all. I'm going to go ahead and add this to my folder of prefabs. Oh, look at that. I actually really like that specular. That works for me, man. Uh what else we got? Oh, we had a sofa here. Let's take a look at this one.
[music]

All right. That looks good, man. I'm happy with it. I'm totally happy with that. Carpets. This one's long, so it's going to be used for our halls, but again, we're going to want to match these to our scene. All right, so there's our rug. Let's just swap it out. Brilliant. It's a little too blue, so we're just going to do a hue saturation shift entirely to the green direction. Brilliant. I actually like those tassels. Actually, it looks really good. What's next? What else we got? Well, uh a table lamp. Put a table lamp here and this would be the light source for this room. We're going to go to universal render pipeline lit, just change out all these materials. In fact, select material, I'm going to grab all of these and just make sure they're all universal render pipeline.
[music]
It's looking good. Freaking love it.

It looks like someone barfed on the table and it stained it and that's what we want. Um what else we got? Paint paintings. We need a big old fat painting. Again, free assets. Free assets all day. There's one painting. Paintings are actually a big big part of interiors and you you just need a lot of them. Oh, good. We've already got textures. Yay! Oh, this is great. So, let's just use these to our advantage. Let's make these sheep look creepy.
[music]
There we go. Look at that. It's disgusting. That's all we want. Guys, that is good enough for for an indie title, that's fine and that's exactly what we want. We want it to be fine. We'll put another painting right here. Um but for this one, we're going to do a different

picture. Okay, paste. There he is. Hopper? We've got a creepy face in the color scheme of the game. We can rotate it a little bit. And you could Guys, you can even do this. Indies have to take advantage of everything they've got at their disposal. So, what I do like to do is if I can, create interesting layering, you know? So, your your job is to try and create diversity within your game without being diverse.
[laughter]
Without actually having a lot of assets at your disposal. Okay, let's see what else we got. Few more assets available to us.
[music]

This is how it looks set dressed with all of our assets. Let's add a flickering light. Let's let's do that. Let's add a a flickering light. I'm just going to do an animation. I'm going to create a table lamp flickering light. We're going to start at six and it's going to go down to five. Definitely valuable. Really, we don't need much post processing. What we do need is potentially fog. So, let's go go ahead and see if we can add some fog in here. So, if I add in fog, what I want it to be is maybe even a dusty brown. Let's see if I can just crank that up. Let's try that. Save it. Hit play. Yeah, it looks much better. Desaturate a little bit. Yeah, it's tempting it's tempting as a developer to just constantly go hardcore

with everything. Lots of fog. Lots of lens flare and bloom. It's like, "No, chill out. Hang tight. Calm down." All right, let's find some horror music. Horror ambient.
[music]
There we go. Grab that, put it into our scene.
[music] [music]
Looks good. One final thing that we could do, guys, to really, you know, get the biggest bang for our buck. What I wanted to do, what I was hoping to do for this tutorial was add some grunge to the walls. I totally forgot to do that. So, let's do that really quick and then

we'll talk about decals, okay? But, if I go to our Poly Haven and I type in like stain, the goal is to find some kind of ugly gross grungy stain. I'm going to grab this and I'm going to make this work. Watch me do it. If I put this at the top of this and I set it to be really dark like that. And this is actually really really valuable. So, I'm I'm I'm glad I remember to do this. If you do that and then you do something like this, just hang tight. It'll make sense. And I do this and put it at the top. Look at that. Now all of my walls, it's got this gross stain kind of rippling through the top. I'm going to create a very strong contrast hit so that it's easy to see, pretty obvious what's happening. There we go. And then what I could do is I could create white drips coming down from the top, blur it. We just need a little bit more texture going on in the scene if I'm being honest. And I could put these This is going to make sense, I promise. The reason they're white is cuz we're going to use this for the mask. Okay,

I'm going to merge all this together, squash it. Good, like that. This we can get rid of. That we get rid of. Get rid of. And what's going to happen is we're going to get a kind of a textured dripping on this. There we go. Gross. See, I knew what I was doing. Just a disgusting drip. So, I really like that texture and what I want to do is I want to create a decal that has this vibe. So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take this, duplicate it, delete everything else. This right here is great. I need a decal that I can place that looks like there's just this ugly dirt that's coming through various parts of the level. So, I'm going to just delete this layer mask and do this. And then I'm going to blur it. This decal is all I really need. I'm going to place this throughout the scene in quads. Create a new 3D object. This decal we can use over and over like right here. I'm going to set it to transparent. Um you want to make sure that you go to the actual texture import settings and remove alpha as transparency or set alpha as transparency and remove PSD mat. You

don't want the specular information preserved. So, I'm going to saturate and make it look kind of green. Crank up that contrast, baby. Yes. All right, decals are your best friend as an indie. You got to have them. I wouldn't be doing in this tutorial if I didn't feel like we needed them. No specular. I'm going to crank this up here. Boom. And then I'm going to move this decal. I'm going to call it a grunge decal. And I can use this everywhere, guys.
[music]
Do you guys see why that was so important?
[music] [music] [music]