Live Workshop: 3 Secrets To A Gorgeous 3D Game (Easy, No Modeling, Bonus Q&A)

to a beautiful, beautiful 3D gra 3 3D game. I honestly believe this. I think at the end of this this workshop, you're going to be like, "Oh, oh, I didn't know that." I think there's going to be some really cool stuff that you learn today that's going to help you make your first, second, third 3D game and make it actually good. Now, what's so funny about today's live stream is that I actually learned what I'm about to teach you from many of you in the chat. For those of you who have played your games on my streams, one thing that I learned over and over and over again from your games, one thing I learned over and over and over again again from your games is that so many of you think that you can get away with just putting assets in

a scene, making it look really, really pretty. And I'll be honest, it always looks really, really pretty because, well, you guys do a good job with that. But you're not doing the third final secret. And the third final secret is directing the scene. Directing it like a film director. Directing the scene or writing the scene or putting together the scene or the level like maybe a writer of a novel. You need to be surgical about every little detail and have the world react to the player and you will be shocked how much it elevates your game. Okay, it's going to make sense. I promise we're going to do it together. It's going to make sense. Before we jump into Unity, I wanted to say a huge, huge thank you to Mark, Oliver, WB, I can't even say that. Michael, Alexandrew, Jordan, Julian, Mahed, um, Caesar, Jefferson. Cool, cool, cool,

and then fluff. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Fulltime GameDev. And by the way, guys, there are four days left to join Fulltime GameDev. So, if you want a shout out in tomorrow's live stream, just like those students got a shout out, check out the link below. This is the perfect course for you. And the reason why is because it's pretty much fully comprehensive. Not only are you gonna learn how an actual indie game developer got published to make these games, okay, this is Never Song, this is Pinstripe, both of these games were published by publishers and those publishers helped me go full-time with just a demo. And by the way, also my third commercial release is currently published by 3D Realms. and 3D Realms, you know, funded this game as well. Granted, I blew through the funding and there was also budget cuts, so I'm kind of funding the rest of the game right now, uh, if I'm being honest. Um, and that game comes

out in a month. If you want to learn how to do that, click the link below. You're also going to get my 2D art program, completely free, my 3D art program, completely free. You're going to master making games in Unity, GDAU, or Unreal. you could take your pick, but also how to build a thriving indie game studio. Hit the Steamfront page, get press coverage, all that cool marketing stuff. And look, don't take it from me. If if you don't trust me, I I understand that. I wouldn't trust me either. I really wouldn't. I don't trust you. I don't trust most you YouTubers. At least take a look at the reviews on my website of students who actually went full-time with the help of the course. Okay, let's go ahead jump into today's workshop. 1300 hours into the game, I see. Oh, yes. Oh yeah, it's uh it's it's been a long journey. Okay, so let's jump in and discuss first the first two secrets we talked about yesterday. And you can check out my live streams um from yesterday and you'll see that yesterday we covered two secrets. And the two

secrets were number one using a unified color palette. And in this case, you could see we've done that. We did teal, gray, and yellow. That was our unified color palette. All of these are free assets. You know, it doesn't look like it, does it? It looks like they're kind of custom. I just threw them in really quick and then retextured them, recolored them, and this is what we ended up with. Okay. The second thing we talked about was level design. One of the key elements of level design with a 3D game is KISS, keep it simple, stupid. So many indie game developers, including myself, make these massive sprawling levels and guess what you get? You get size, right? But it's not very effective. It doesn't work. That sounds really, really phallic. Think about it that way, though. size really doesn't matter in

the game world. Sure, if you want to make like an open world game, that's a totally different thing. But in the case of a of an indie game, keep it small, keep it focused, guide the player step by step to various elements of your level, and then be done. And that's your scene. There's no reason to create an optimization nightmare. Instead, just focus on creating a clean level design. Okay. So, in this case, what we did was we just basically locked the player in to this. Okay. Now, I'm not going to bore you guys, but what I would do, and this is my final recommendation for that second secret, and then we'll move on to the the third secret. What I would do is I'm just not going to do it during the stream because it'll bore you. I would create quads of large gates, large iron gates, and it would just frame in this section here, and the player just wouldn't be able to move beyond here. In fact, I might actually

bore you guys with it. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to take this, the dead tree. I'm going to open it up in Photoshop and we're just going to find a cast iron PNG and we're going to use it. But Thomas, that's really low fidelity. Who cares? Who cares there? Like I've noticed this uh cast iron gate or fence. Cast iron fence. Um if there's anything I've noticed about beta testing for my games and I've gone through beta testing for the last it's been like six months uh beta testing my own game with beta testers. If there's anything that I've found to be true, it's that the things that you think players 3840 by 38 by 3840. If there's anything that I found is that you the things you think players care about, they don't care about. So you're thinking, man, I need to make a really highfidelity cast iron fence. That's what I'm going to do today. When in reality, the player is what they're worried about is they're worried about

this level is boring. Nothing's happening. This feels like an asset flip game. I'm lost. What's the point? Why am I here? Who is the character? What is the story? Okay, these are things that players care about. Sure, I might want to go in and clean up the cast iron fence, but the truth is is that's secondary, especially for an indie game. This is my cast iron fence. Who cares? I don't care because I know that it's actually going to look good for most players because most players aren't even going to go over here. So, here's my cast iron fence. Turn on my alpha clipping. There it is. is it's got its mesh collider on there. I'm going to go ahead and create a prefab out of it. And this is again, we're on the second secret here. We're wrapping up the second secret, which is level design, guiding the player, limiting the player, keeping your level small.

You don't always have to keep them small, but this is a a good rule of thumb for most indies, especially the first five minutes of a game. Keep it nice and small and tight. Guide the player. Teach them how to play. Put some cool triggers in there. We'll do that in a sec. And you're good. That's it. And and you'll be surprised how satisfied your players are. Okay. So, we're gonna call this cast iron fence. Put it in my prefabs so that I can use it over and over again. There he is. I'm going to make it really big. And frankly, let's see how it looks from a distance here. What did I freaking tell you? Y'all just need to trust me. Okay, so let's go ahead and just lock our player in to this fencing. Okay, we're going to make a big group of them fence and I'm just going to take that set the to the center point here and just wrap it around our our scene. We're just going

to lock our player in. Especially with this sort of low res PS2 type game, I'm totally fine just keeping it simple. K I SS guys. It's amazing what you can accomplish in indie gamedev when you're willing to just let things go. And and the thing is is like I think it looks great. I'm looking at this fence. I'm like I love that fence. It makes me feel good. It's really eerie. Right. I'm happy with it. Let's move it over though. We're going to do this. Yeah. Let's put it over here a little bit more distant. Probably doesn't need to be that tall either. Yeah, there we go. Now, we could also do this with ProBuilder. You could go into ProBuilder and just make a really nice clean um actually it doesn't look bad. Uh a really nice clean

ProBuilder mesh and just put the texture on there and call it a day, you know. So yeah, let's just put this around the scene. And what's the big point here? Just so I can reiterate it. I think every every pretty much every game, every game I've played, they don't limit the player. Like all these 3D games that I play from you guys and and they're good games. You guys do a good job. But one of the big problems is the player doesn't have any limits. And so I always end up just going off into like backwards. And the developers thinking, why did Thomas do that? Well, because most players are going to do that. They're going to go where if if they see an open space, they're going to go there. Okay. Now, sometimes with these with these gates, what you can or these fences are locking in the player, it's totally fine to maybe do something like this. But just remember, just remember,

you might want to limit the player in other ways. Okay? So, for example, I might want the gate to go over there, but I'll put big rocks here blocking the player. Okay. And let's put one over here as well. Maybe right here. Yep. Let's go to our fence here. And this isn't going to be perfect, guys. I just want you to get the idea. Whoops. I want you to get the idea because it's it's not going to be perfect at all because we're in the middle of a live stream and I don't want to bore you too much. But this is the idea. Limit the player. It's okay to limit the player. In fact, the player is going to love you for it. Okay? The player's going to love you for it. Let's put some rocks there to make it feel a little bit more interesting. And I'm going to uh

Thomas, will you ever play games like Paddle Paddle or Friends Slop? No. I mean, sure. I I play Friend slop sometimes. I don't ever play What I mean is I'll play y'all's games, but I'm not going to play it in my free time. No, because I just I' I've said this a million times. I'm not It's just not for me. I don't really play multiplayer games. Honestly, multiplayer games make me nervous. I don't know why I get nervous. I get like social anxiety when I play them. Does this make sense what we've just done here, guys? By limiting the player. Does this make sense? Any questions about why I feel like this is very, very valuable and important. This kind of stuff is crucial because now the the level has a very small limit to it and um I don't have to worry about anything else as a developer. Right.

There we go. Let's paint some rock there as well just to wrap up this section here. this uh or this this my point. Just paint some rock here to make it feel like the player is nice and nestled in to a section of our level. Does that make sense, guys? What we're doing here, maybe add some dirt. So, if we enter play mode, let me let me show you. Is that fence just a PNG? Yes. That's all we needed, guys. How long did that take? Do do you understand how valuable this is for players? They start the game. I got in a car wreck. Oh, my head is killing me. And all I see is, okay, looks like all I need to do is go here.

Boom. We started the game. Well, right. There's no confusion about what to do. I, as the developer, don't get lost developing a massive sprawling level. Over here, we could put a bench and a lamp post and maybe some a cool artifact. And that's it. There's just so many games that I've played on stream where I'm just like, what am I doing? Where am I going? What's the point? Right. So, all this stuff over here, I'd probably lock the player in again. I'd probably add some rocks or like a a another sort of large fence right there and just lock that player in. It's okay. And drive them to what? Here. And if I wanted to, I could put a key over here. Right. And that's it. That's all we would do. All right, let's move on to the next point. Unfocused environments feel like plot holes in movies. I totally agree.

I totally agree. How do you know when to scale a level up? play testing. So, play testers will tell you, they'll say, and this happened to me all the time. We would go really big for Twisted Tower, and it was huge, and it was like players would play and they'd be like, I'm just bored. I'm just like just running. What is this? And so then you'd scale it down, and then they'd say, well, it feels really tight now. So, it's like this, it's this balance of creating a level that's uh scaled around the player movement and player mechanics. Okay, the next thing that we're going to talk about is directing your scene. Here's what we've got so far. We've got a fairly muted game, but it's not alive. And when I say directing a scene, I just mean make it feel alive. Make it tell a story. Okay. So, right now there's nothing. Um, what I'm going to do really quick is just add on some footsteps. Now, fortunately for

me, they already exist. They're right here, and I think that's all we need. This is a character controller that I downloaded. It already has sounds for feet. Pretty good. But let's tell a story, guys. Here's what I mean. Every little detail, including footstep sounds, right? Even footstep sounds, we can tell a story. What kind of story can we tell? Well, maybe we can say it just rained here. Do you want to try that? So, let's see if we can. There we go. We have grass here. And there's the grass footstep sounds. Let's open this up in Audacity and add a little bit of a mud sound to it. So, I'm going to go to artless.io.

sound effects. I'm going to type in mud step or wet foot step. And just a subtle a subtle wet sound. There we go. We're just going to look. We're just going to tell a little bit of a story. Everything we're doing is is trying to hint to the player. This is more. This is more than an asset flip game. There's so much more here than just a typical indie game that's like, "H, yep. Standard footstep sounds. Yep. Standard textures that you downloaded from a pack. Yep. Asset flip. Everything's high fidelity. Yep. There's no triggers. There's no triggered sequences. All of the sound effects sound exactly the same as every other indie game. Oh, I found a key. I'm lost. I don't know what to do. Lock door. Lock door. Lock door. Lock. I

have played so many of these games. And instead, what we're going to do is we're going to go in there and add our own voice and add our own specific unique storytelling to this singular tiny, and I said it yesterday. I love this word, tiny vignette. this little moment. We're going to add in sauce and spice and salt and pepper and jalapenos. Okay, here we go. Let's go ahead and open up the footstep sound. Here it is. It's a bunch of grass sounds. I can't hear it for some reason. I don't love how this sound works. Basically, what the way this character controller that I downloaded handled it is it just it just plays these sounds on repeat, which I don't like. But let's go ahead and make sure we can hear it. Playback device. It needs to be my There we go.

So, I'm going to go ahead and make sure it matches up to our footsteps. I want it to sound like it just rained. Do you guys see what's going on here? I'm taking something. This is something that I do for my short horror films as well. In my short horror film, I'm gonna I'm going to stand on this soap box for a while. My short horror film is currently at I think and I'm flexing here, by the way. I am bragging. My short horror film is currently at 650,000 views, I believe, on YouTube. I'm gonna have to double check that to be sure. the unlocking short horror film. Okay, it is currently at se almost 700,000 views. Now, one of the reasons why that film worked and the one of the reasons it went viral or I think it went pretty good at least is because there are things in that

short horror film that you've never seen before and you go, "What? Wait, what? Who who who is this guy who made this movie? Why did Why did that happen? That's interesting. That's interesting. It's stuff that you've never seen. The goal is to not be AI. Okay. AI is you take all of your inspiration and you funnel it down into a product. Well, if if all you're doing is just getting inspired by stuff and then distilling it down into an average, that's what AI does. It's the same thing. And that's why AI always looks like slop. that always looks the same as everything else you want to go in and add your voice and your flare to things. So, every little detail that you could think of that's unique and different, let's add. So, for example, I'm tempted I'm tempted to add the sound of a dog barking in the woods. Well, let's not do that. Why don't we add the sound of a

a gun like three gunshots and the sound of a screaming woman? Or maybe even go even further? Why not add a giant fart sound? Let's do it. And then a scream. And then a laugh. There's just so many things you can do. There we go. That's a good one. It's going to sound like grass that is on mud. And we'll make it subtle. And we're not going to have it that Well, I guess we can. [sighs] By the way, do you guys see what's going on here with this terrible design for how this character controller was created? I hate this so much.

Okay, that's good enough. And then also what we need is leaves. So, we're just trying to create or tell a story here. What is this place? What just happened? What's the weather like? Okay, so we got wet leaves, we got mud, we got grass, and we're kind of mixing it all together into our own little custom sound. And we'll we'll we'll uh adjust the volumes of all of this. By the way, those of you just joining us, remember you can check out that full-time gamedev link below, which is my massive course, which teaches you everything I've learned in the last decade of making indie games, getting published on three separate occasions, going full-time with just a demo. And

yes, I actually did do that if if you're curious. Okay, here we go. So, this is going to be our new sound. I want that mud to be a little bit louder. Okay, I'm going to export this. You want to make sure it loops well. Okay, let's export it as grass, leaves, mud. All right, and we're going to export that and put that in our project here. Silent Hill remake assets. We're going to just put it in our sounds. There we go. And I'm going to call that grass, leaves, mud. Right. Okay. Let's go ahead and jump into Unity here and update our sound so that we're just telling a little bit of a story here.

We're trying to say something. We're trying to say something about this world in this environment. So, there's our grass. So, I'm going to go ahead and um I'm actually going to make the default the grass leaves mud. That's fine. We're not going to create dynamic sound right now, but overall, this is the vibe we're going for. Okay, let's get rid of the mud. The mud is a little intense. There we go. That's all we need. And then that should make it feel [music] like this world is is real. And I'm going to drop the volume down a little bit here. And we should be able to see. Well, see, but this is the thing. This is my challenge to you, Foxite.

Yes, a raven sound would be cool, but my challenge to all of you guys, and this is a challenge for me as well. Is it possible to go in there and add your own seasoning and spice to this dish? Instead of throwing in the typical, here's some salt and pepper and some a little bit of basil, why don't we go, what would happen if I threw in Skittles into this thing? And that is the challenge of 2026, isn't it? The challenge of 2026 is how do you stand out, right? Oh, that sounds great. See how it feels a little squishy, too. Okay, let's go to ambience, guys. How do we make this sound a little bit more unique? Let's think about our ambience for a second. What could we do to our ambience to make

it feel like, okay, this game's different? This is more than a walking sim, an actual developer with a voice and a personality made this game. Well, obviously you want the sound of wind in autumn in a forest. Obviously, let's start with the basics. Okay, that's great. I love that. But what could we do? What could we do to make this much more unique, right? What could we do? And this is where you got to sit and think quietly.

chainsaws. Oh, that's terrifying. I love that clown laugh.
[laughter] [laughter]
Why not a child laughing in the distance? We're telling a story. Okay, what's the story? I I'll tell Let me challenge you guys with this. [laughter]

[laughter] [crying] [laughter] [crying]
No. [laughter] Okay, that's great. My challenge to you guys is to tell a story in the smallest things. Let's tell a story with just our sounds, with our ambient sounds. Okay, we have a child laughing. We have a chainsaw, right? And then we have a forest. Okay, those are our three sounds. What's the story we're going to tell? Well, we have a chainsaw. We have a child. What else could we put in there? What about a screaming male in pain?
[screaming]

[screaming]
I love that. What about some blood splatter? We're just trying to use the lowest hanging fruit possible. Really cheap stuff. Really cheap stuff. Do a cool ambient soundtrack that loops. Took me five minutes. It took five seconds, you know. Oh, maybe it'll take me five minutes to create this, but it's valuable, right? Because here. So, we start the level and then we hear the chainsaw. Now we hear a child [laughter] and then a chainsaw starts.

That's great. Very distant, right? And then blood splatter. Very subtle. Very subtle. Okay. And just have it fade out. We don't need anything else. A little bit of blood and then some screaming. What What's the story? Does anyone want to guess what the story is? Where'd it go? The screaming man. Where did it go? You didn't He didn't down. He didn't download mailc screen in pain.

[screaming] That's great. What's the story? What's the story we're telling? And that's how that's how I think you guys should should be thinking about your games. Okay. That's it. That's all we need. And I'm going to take this and we're going to have two of them. We can maybe remove this portion here, this portion here, the mail screen. And then you just take all those, mix them together track, add stereo track, add some reverb. Um,

and then maybe delay it a little bit and it'll sound like it's coming from the distance. Okay, good. And then we're just going to put the two of them together. We'll we'll mix and render them together. Um, drop the volume down significantly. We just want it to be barely there. And then you just let it go. And as the player explores, they hear more just these tiny little details where I

can imagine my my brothers playing this game. That's I I tend to do that. I think about what would my brothers say. They're walking around. The goal is they're walking around, muddy footprints, and they go, "Wait, what was what the heck? What was that?" And they barely heard it, right? That's it. So, there's our ambience, right? So, let's go ahead and type in ambience and throw that into our project. Does that make sense, guys? That we're we're we're slowly telling a story and we're creating something that's more than just I'm getting frustrated lately because so many people think they could just push out games. YOU JUST PUSH THEM OUT. GET IT OUT. GET YOUR demo out. And it's like, yeah, get your first crappy game out there, but if it's your second or third game, it's start time to start adding in your own special spice and start saying something. No, I'm not

saying you have to say some some political message or religious message or philosophical message. What I mean is say something in your voice. Make it look and sound and feel like your game. If anything, I don't even care if it's a good game. Does that make sense? All right, let's try it. turn it up for you guys. And then it goes away and you're like, "Okay, we're telling we're telling a story."

So, how many of you understand what I mean when I say we're telling a story? We're just saying something. Okay, it must have just rained. Uh, there's a car. I must have gotten in a car wreck. And we'll do a voice over in a second. Um, I must have gotten in a car wreck or something. And I think there might be a child with a chainsaw in the woods. I need to get inside, right? No, we don't need that to be spatial. That one doesn't need to be spatial. In fact, what you could do, I mean, I guess you could if you really, really wanted to. Let's make sure that's not too loud. Yeah, you want, oddly enough, less less white noise is scarier, especially with with horror games. Um, when you have less white noise, it makes you sort of much more careful.

Okay, let's come up with some dialogue. Okay, let's tell a story. What's my biggest harp when I play indie games? Does anyone know? When I play indie games, what's the thing that I get the most graded with and the most irritated by? Can anyone remember? I'm going to start writing.

I'm going to write the dialogue here.

Okay. The thing I get the most irritated with. The thing I most get the most irritated with. And then we'll we'll talk about what I just wrote here. I don't like games where there's no motivation. I don't like games where the player doesn't know that they don't know something. I I want to tell the player, hey, you don't know where you are. Hey, here's the goal. Hey, here's why you should keep playing.

Okay. So, here's what we're going to do. This is our This is our dialogue that's going to fire the moment we we enter play mode. Okay. Here we go. You guys know I like British accents. I guess this is the place. I'm in the middle of nowhere. Well, Dad said the inheritance money was in the crawl space of that motel. I never knew why he put all of it. Wait, what?

Let's hope it's still there. Let's try again. I guess this is the place. I'm in the middle of nowhere. Dad said the inheritance money was in the crawl space at that motel. Let's hope it's still there. That's it. That's all we need. Something to give us motivation to let us know we don't know where we are. To let us know of some kind of character arc or story. Okay, in this case, sounds like his dad just died. Sounds like he told us where the inheritance money is. And we're going to go get it in a crawl space. Something like that. Here we go. Let's hope it's still there. Let's try again. I guess this is the place. I'm in the middle of nowhere. Dad said the inheritance money was in

the crawl space at that motel. Let's hope it's still Okay, the popping is a problem. Let's try one more time. [sighs and gasps] I guess this is the place. I'm in the middle of nowhere. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there. That's it. Throw a compressor on there. And look, you you're probably thinking, well, why don't we get a professional voice actor? You might be thinking that. Let's go pay them. Get everything laid out first. This is something I've learned with Twisted Tower. Get your voice acting in the game. Do it yourself. And then once the the story is finalized, you can go get voice actors and actresses. Let's try one more time. Okay, here we go. [sighs] I guess this is the place. I'm in the middle of nowhere. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's try one

more time. I guess this is the place. [sighs] Am I in the middle of nowhere? Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there. That's it. All right. Do a compressor. I guess this is the place. Am I in the middle of nowhere? Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that This is irrelevant. I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there. All right, one more time. I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there. Does this

make sense, guys? We're providing motive to the player. We're letting the player know something tiny, tiny little thing that makes them go, "Okay, I want to scratch this itch. Let's go. Let's go find that money. What is this money? Where is it? Why? Why am I here?" All these questions arise in the player from a single sentence. Okay, does that make sense? But Thomas, I'm making Friendlop. But Thomas, I'm um I'm making an open world game. But Thomas, I'm making a first-p person shooter like Doom. It doesn't matter. Just give me something, a tiny little thing to know. Okay, this is the goal and this is the destination. We're going to put some voice acting here. There's no voice acting system right now. I don't care. And then we'll do some dialogue on screen or some UI on screen like this. This is something I want to talk to you guys about. When it

comes to UI in your game, how many fonts should we have? Does anyone know? Yes, this is the place. How many should we have? Anyone know? Sure. I think keeping it more vague would be great. I love that. Um, let's just use We're going to keep We're going to use this font here. Very clean font, but you can make it look cooler by maybe adding some spacing and some spacing between the lines. We're going to center it up. zero out its position. There we go. We're gonna do a little bit of a creamy color. Um, let's increase the width. There we go.

And let's do a creamy color here. Maybe even match. There we go. And we're just going to fade it in along with the dialogue. Um, let's throw in an animation here. And look, I understand you need a whole system to do dialogue, but this is just for the sake of this video. Okay, window animation. We're going to start the player at the bottom of the screen or at the at the next to his car sounds. Okay, let's create a new folder animation. Okay, we'll just fade it in. Okay, that's it. There we go. We'll start here. It'll fade in after, let's say, half a second.

Fade it in. And how long is it? Let's see. 8.2 seconds. So, again, we're just manufacturing something here. Um, but you guys get the idea, right? So, it'll fade in. So, let's hit play and take a look at how this this feels. Okay, I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there. Good. So, what we're going to do is we're going to have that sound play. What this is what you should do. This is what you would typically do. Okay. you would have the voice acting lines trigger here and then when we get here we trigger that sound. Okay, that's what I would do in an actual game. But right now to just to show you guys and to not waste your time, I'm just going to sort of manufacture it. Okay. Um so when it comes to the ambient sounds, where was it?

Yeah, when it comes to the ambient sounds, let's find that ambience really quick and fix it. What you want is that to play maybe 10 seconds after the player has gotten that first sort of story beat. And by the way, this stuff is incredibly valuable even for um and I mentioned it earlier, but even for any like any genre, this stuff is valuable for giving the player some kind of motive. It doesn't even have to be a story necessarily. You could say, "Hey, here's here's all the abilities the player has." and then take them away or here's all the upgrades that are going to be available to you and then start the player with nothing. You're giving them a goal in a destination. It could be a story destination. It could be an upgrades destination.

Well, we're not done with the car yet. Yeah, we're not done with the car yet. I'll show you what we're going to do. This is our ambience. Save it. Okay. Let's let's tell some more story. Let's give little little world building uh motifs. This car right here. Actually, no. We're not going to do that for now because the reason why is because um the car would be an odd thing because he would what I would want him to say is if the car wrecked or something, we would put smoke coming out of the car and then we'd put like a road right here and we would say um we would have him wake up and say, "Where the hell am I? [sighs] I think I might have broken a leg." But we're just going to do this for now. And we're going to have the player start here, right?

There's our player controller. Put him right here. Where? Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There we go. Let's Let's uh figure out what's going on here. He's right there, but for some reason, I can't position him. Let's see. Pivot. There we go. We'll position the player right here. Let's enter play mode and see how it feels. I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there. Okay. What other story elements can we tell? Well, what if we put a flickering light here to guide the player?

Okay, let's do that. Let's do a flickering light. like this and then you have it stay put for maybe a couple seconds and then it starts over. Okay. And we'll make it a little bit more interesting. Have it hang tight a little bit. Maybe stretch it out a little bit like this so it's not so annoying. Flickering lights can get really annoying. Okay, we're just going to have it hold there for a little bit like that and

then we'll have it go back to the original. Okay, so this is our flickering light. Why? To guide the player. Okay, we can dim this like that. This can maybe be a different color so that this is has a more of a focus. Maybe a red. Yeah, we want this to have a different focus. And the reason why is we're going to put a trash can underneath it and we're going to tell a story, right? We're just telling little stories with our with our world. And it's it's crazy how in unfre infrequently this is for most indies. They're not thinking in terms of the players progression through an area. They're thinking um let's rotate the

whole thing. They're thinking, "Oo, the level looks pretty," but they're not thinking, "What's the player psychology here? How do I keep the player interested? How do I keep telling them something new or making them feel like the world is alive?" Right? So, let's enter play and see how this feels. I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space. happens. Finds a squirrel in the trash. Oh, I hope I saved. Good. I did. Thank god. All right, let's head to play mode again and see how this feels. I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there.

The player might go here, right? They might go here, but they're eventually going to go over here. So, what's the story? Can anybody guess so far with the sound, with the arm, with the flickering light, with the intro? Somebody give me a brief overview of the setup here. What's the setup with all the details we have? Y'all give me a setup. And that's what we want. You want the player to have maybe five seconds to realize, okay, I think I kind of get the idea here. Let's add some neon to this. Does anyone have an idea of what's going on here? Give me a setup.

This is our emissive. [laughter] Scary motel. Uh, nope.jpeg. Man goes to get his money, but there are crazy people there stopping him. Yep. Definitely not an organ. See, these are questions. These are good questions that you want the player to have. Um, is this Yeah. Is this an organ harvesting farm? Um, is the money here? We've also created a barrier. So, basically, we've said the player needs the money, and then you see the violence

and you say, "Wow, I don't want to go in there, but I want the money." So, you create conflict. Is it perfect? No. But it's hopefully giving you guys an idea of how this works, right? How we can create motivation and and and intrigue. Good. There we go. With this, what you can do is you can actually add a color overlay of black. And then you can do a stroke of white. Save it. And now we have neon. I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space. That motel.

Let's hope it's still there. You can have some of the the letters going in and out. Right. And I kind of want to keep it. I don't love the blue. It doesn't scare me. Maybe like a red. And then with the emissive, we'll do a red as well. Maybe reduce the uh There we go. There we go.

You can even have that flicker as well. Let's You want to do it? Let's make it flicker. Emissives are tough to flicker sometimes. Sometimes they don't work. I don't know why. This is a common problem that I've had. But we're going to go flickering neon. We're telling a story, right? This is an old motel. Let it hang and then let it flicker. And we'll have this one stay put to here. There we go. [sighs] Right. Okay. Okay, let's hit play and take a look.

I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space of that motel. Let's hope it's still there. Okay, good. And we'll make sure that our uh resolution is correct. Um so the text doesn't scale like that. But uh the next thing the next thing is music. Okay. So, do we want constant music? Maybe. Let's type in horror ambience in artless.io. No, let's do mystery ambience.

[music] No load. It's not loading for some reason. What in the world?
[music]
Why is it doing this? [music] It's super slow for some reason. Okay. Yeah. Let's use this. This is great. Oh, yeah. But what we're going to do is we're going to make sure it doesn't

throw us off. Okay. So, we're going to basically do this. We're going to fade it out and then also reverb it. So, we're gonna go dad said it was in the crawl space blah blah blah. And we're just going to basically make it slowly get more and more reverbby and fade out just as an intro. It's crazy how just that singular like 10 30 seconds of music stays with the player. You don't have to have it go on on repeat. [music] Then we'll just basically fade this out, fade this in, and then fade it out.

That's perfect. So, we'll just start with that single mystery music, right? Throw it in there. Okay. Is it there? Where is it?
Let's try it. It might do it twice.
I guess this is the place.
I think that inheritable spot is a crawl space.
It is. That's
so we need to go back in time. For some reason, it added music. Hold on.

I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in a crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there. So, what we're going to do, we're going to figure out where that music went. I need to go back in time. Oops. Redo, edit, curve. Redo, edit curve. Okay, there we go. We're going to add it to here. Call it music. Make it 0.5. Probably add some reverb to it, honestly. Maybe like a big forest. Let's try it. I guess this is the place. Dad said the inheritance money was in the crawl space in that motel. Let's hope it's still there.

Honestly, if I if I started a game if I started playing a game like this, I'd be I'd be pretty interested right away. The goal is to generate interest. It's to direct the player and direct the scene and say something, right? Say something with your scene. Now, look at we what we've accomplished in I guess a total of three and a half hours, four hours since yesterday's stream. And this kind of stuff is is a great setup. And it's great to send to publishers because the publisher will see this and they go they don't have a lot of time. So, they'll have 10 seconds to maybe five minutes to go. Yes, I'm interested. No, I'm not. And if I'm not interested, players won't be either. Right. Um,

yep. Yep. Okay guys, that is all we have time for today. I got to jump back on making Twisted Tower, but if you had a good time, remember to check out Fulltime GameDev below. Huge shout out to these students here. Tomorrow's live stream, these are new students who joined in full-time gamedev. Tomorrow's live stream, we're just going to play some of your games and we're going to talk about what we learned today in that stream tomorrow as I analyze and play other games as well. Hope that was super duper helpful to you guys. Click the link below and check out full-time gamedev if you're interested in enrolling during the summer sale. You got four days left. You're going to learn everything I've learned in the last decade of getting published, doing Kickstarter campaigns. Um, and I was recently published, or not recently, but my latest game was published by uh 3D Realms for a game called Twisted Tower, and that is currently about to be released at the end of August, August 18th. So, that's my third commercial release called Twisted Tower. So, if you're interested in learning from an actual indie game

developer who's gone full-time with three separate games, and you want to learn how you can do it, too, and how to hit the Steamfront page, how to make a game in Unity, GDAU, or Unreal, check out the link below. See if it's something you're interested And by the way, if you're a student, let me know in the chat what you think about it. I [snorts] love you guys. I hope that was fun. I had a blast. I wish we could spend more time on this project. And I think maybe, just maybe, I think maybe I'm going to make a game like this um for my next game because I love the vibe and the mood. Makes me really happy. I love you guys. Um thank you so much.