Making A 3D Game Is Way Easier Than You Think (Retro 3d Game)

Okay, so I wanted to see if I could make a retro, I don't know, Ocarina of Time mixed with like PSX era uh game. And I wanted to do it live. I wanted to do it all in one sitting. I wanted to see if I could do it with free assets. Now, granted, a lot of these assets are What What's the word? Illegal. But it's just for the purposes of this tutorial. I just Googled images and slapped them into Photoshop and then Unity. And then also, this is the important part, I wanted to do it with no modeling skills. I want you guys to be able to jump inside of Unity and just make something beautiful using free assets and asset [music] flipping. So, let's jump inside of Unity and get started. Before we get started, I want to say a huge, huge thank you to this video's sponsor. It supports the channel, supports the podcast, helps support the final leg of my game's development. And that is Bezi. By the way, if you're making games in Unity, uh Bezi is a development assistant that actually understands your project. It can code, it can quickly build prototypes, implement mechanics, create shaders, and debug issues far more efficiently than a lot of other AI

tools. See, with agent mode, Bezi can make changes directly inside Unity, um from generating scripts to fixing bugs, all with reviewable changes and diffs. You can approve or modify before they touch your project. What makes Bezi different is that it understands your project on a very deep level. This is different than other AI tools, and it works like a proactive building partner. It indexes your entire Unity project in real time. Uh that's the scripts, the packages, the scenes, the prefabs, the assets. And it can also understand things like GDDs, feature specs, spreadsheets. So, it's always going to know what you're trying to build. Your project stays private and fully yours, and Bezi focuses purely on the technical side, not the art or the music. So, you can spend more time on the creative work that actually matters. Bezi is completely free for anyone to try, and you can download it by simply clicking the link in the description. First thing here, skybox. We're making

something similar to like Ocarina of Time. I really wanted to have that old school N64 vibe. And so that's the first thing I'm going to do. I'm just going to type in in Google and I'm going to type in blue skybox. Now, everything we're using here is completely legal. The reason I'm doing it this way is to do it quick and just free and so you can find assets. Now, you need to get make sure you're looking for the exact right legal assets. For me, we're just going to be using Google, okay? Just for the purposes of today in this video, super quick, super fast. Now, what you don't want to do is you don't want to look for some super high hyper stylized or hyper unique skybox. We're not creating Wind Waker. We're not creating Breath of the Wild. We're creating an old school game. In old school games, they used old school boring-looking skyboxes, if I'm being completely honest. And they didn't even care anyway because it's all pixelated. This is my skybox. It's just super simple. It's a PSD. The benefit of using PSDs is we can quickly iterate. Now, is it slower on import? Yes, it's slower on import. Is it bulkier project

files? 1,000%. But that kind of stuff, that doesn't bother me. So, we don't want two suns. So, I'm going to remove this one. Edit, fill. Okay, and then I'm going to make sure that there's no pinching. I'll show you what I mean by pinching. Hang on. And already it looks 10 times better, okay? So, there's our sky. I'm going to squash it a little bit so it's not so massive. It looks really big and bulky. Um but there's pinching right there. So, the way that we're going to remove the pinching is I'm going to grab this color here. Just do this. And now when we look up, we don't see any pinching, but we do see the seam here. I'm going to show you how to make that seamless. It does not look cohesive, obviously. We've got a bunch of missing textures. We've got free assets. We've got ugly quads that I've added for retro-looking art assets like like What is that called? It's called a fence. Um we've got trees. They're not going to

be blowing in the wind or anything. It's all retro. And then we're on terrain here. And we'll talk about how to make the terrain look look better cuz right now it looks like crap. I'm going to squash my skybox a little bit more and make it smaller cuz right now it looks really big and in your face. Better, I'm going to squash it like this though. Bring it up closer to the horizon. Good. Do you see why I want to use PSDs? I'm quickly iterating. Now let's go ahead and make sure it loops properly and we're going to work we're going to jump into our color palette in just a sec. In order to get it to tile or mirror correctly, all I've got to do is move this over here. I'm going to crop this. It's all one image. I'm going to crop it, duplicate it, transform flip vertical or I'm sorry, flip horizontal. Move it over here so it's snug against this edge over here. You can see that pink line just appeared. And then fade like so. Just like that. Okay, so far so good. Now let's talk about our color palette. The first thing I want to do is am I absolutely sure about the background?

About the sky? Well, I'm not sure about this. That top blue portion, not my favorite. It shouldn't get lighter when I look up. You want it to get darker as we look up. Let's see if that's true. Yep, there we go. I want to make it a look a little bit more stylized. So what I'm going to do is go a little bit more to the green, desaturate it. Oh, also this needs to be much more saturated at the top and much more darker. There we go. And overall, I think that's Yes, that's the skybox I want. And now what I'm going to do is choose my color palette. I want grass. So we're going to choose the color of our grass. I'm not going to choose an ugly color like this. I'm going to choose a nice sort of desaturated yellowy grass. You guys know I love sort of yellowy grass. But I'm not going to go too crazy. I don't want to go too stylish because then it's not going to feel like Ocarina of Time. So that green looks pretty good with that blue. Let's think about our dirt color. Our dirt color is going to be a low saturation reddish dirt, like that. I could probably crank up this saturation here. There we go. Go a little bit more towards the yellow side, and then I can actually desaturate the sky, and maybe

lighten it a little bit. It's It's going to look a little bit stylish. This is going to be the That's the color of the tree bark, the color of the ground, dark. Yep. And what other assets do we have in here that we will be using color for? Ah, yes, just straight-up stone. Straight-up stone, we could probably do just a gray. Yeah, we're going to do a little bit more saturation. By the way, if you're thinking, "Wow, Thomas is floundering." This is how I pick colors. That's why I like to start with the the skybox to get a nice understanding of what just a very abstract view, kind of a bird's-eye view, of what my colors are going to be. Okay, and then we're going to need a pop of color as well. The pop of color could be like an orange or a red. There we go. And that's going to appear less frequently. This is what we're going to use for our retro kind of Ocarina of Time game. And now what we're going to do is just adjust the hue, but not colorize. I'm not going to colorize this grass. Why? Because if you colorize it,

it makes everything look really flat. You can even see the watermarks here. That's hilarious. That's pretty good. Save that. It's going to look like crap, but hang tight. Now, if it looks like crap in Unity, it's a lighting problem. Right now, this is why it's so important to have a color palette in something that's lighting independent. You don't want to make sure your colors match in the game right now. You want to make sure they match in Photoshop. This is our standard. There's no weird variables, you know, adjusting our colors here. Uh so, I'm going to grab this here, this tree. First thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to remove all the other higher resolution LODs. There we go, and all we have is this one. Nice and ugly. That's what we want for the retro game. I'm going to remove the LOD group. Okay, let's go Go and make this a Photoshop file. This is a little bit bit different because now we're we're getting we're getting hung up on the shaders. Okay, so I'm going to save it as a PSD. This shader takes this red color and it adjusts it. You can see that it's taking that red and it's adjusting it. So that's the primary color. This is totally fine. We're just working within the confines of our the

assets we have, right? If I really wanted to though, I could take this. My theory is I could take this, put it in the URP and just do lit. We'll see what happens here. I can grab that leaf PSB, add it to the base layer. Yep, this is probably what I'm going to do. I'd rather do this. Okay, so what I could do here is I could just do a hue adjustment of the reds. I'm going to grab this color here. That's the same color we want. Yep. And I'm just going to make sure that it's ex- pretty much matching that color. Do you see guys? I'm going to make sure I go to my greens and adjust the base layer down there and I'm going to match it to the trees. This is stonework. This is trees. So I'm just going to take this color and I'm going to put it right here. Look at that. It's super vibrant. I'm going to assume that that vibrancy is from the directional light. I hope that's true. Let's see if we turn it down. In fact, I'm just going to create an a a like a simple that's unlit. No, no, no. Here's what we're going to do. Let's turn off any ambient lighting and now let's officially bring in our directional light. There we go. All right. We've got

our directional light and I don't know which way it's facing because it's not casting shadows, but overall that's fine. Let's keep colorizing. Look, what do you what do you think? Our dirt matches our trees. Our trees are way too transparent right there. They're like see-through. We're going to have to figure that out. So our dirt matches our trees and it matches our tree trunks. So far so good. Moving on. What else do we got? We got this ugly fence. Well, let's remove the white. I think you're going to be very surprised how this all looks amazing. We're going to make this kind of seamless here and I'm just going to do a very simple colorize right now. We're going to match it to the tree bark. That's it. Save it and then I'm going to go ahead and make sure that it's set to alpha clipping. Dude, already. Already looking good here.

Okay, we're not going to do any weird pixel pixelation of this right now. We're going to leave it as is. We're not going to do any weird shaders associated with it to make it wobble in the wind. We're not going to try and make it look high fidelity. Good, turn off the smoothness values. And now we have retro bushes. What is that? That was supposed to be the mountain. So I'm going to
[laughter and gasps]
I'm going to set this back to what it was. That was a prefab, sorry. There it is. Alrighty. I'm going to delete that. I'm going to trim it. And what I'm going to do guys is I'm just going to kind of make it a little bit more taller, kind of like the Death Mountain. There we go. Just using my mouse here. Death Mountain and obviously you have the ring over top. Is that what it looks like? I don't even know. Let's
[laughter]
I forget. Awesome. Okay, there we go. I'm going to make that smoke ring look a lot better. But we're all just getting the colors down. That's all we're doing here. Guys, it's already looking so much

better. Look at this. Let's just get those pink rocks removed and adjust the coloring and then we're going to add fog and lighting and pixelation, sound and do some terrain work and it's going to be like, "Whoa." All right. Save it as a PSD, of course. That's this right here. Boom, there you go. Turn off the specular. This right here. Same thing. Boom. Turn off the specular. And then this stone, set it to lit and you'll notice we got tune shaded rocks. Don't worry, we're going to make them look great. The first question I have is does this baked normal map? And in fact, I can even if I got rid of it, you're going to see baked AO baked AO on it and the seams are nice and have this nice sort of shade on it. I think this is a bad idea. I think this is going to make it look like a GameCube game and not an N64 game. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to remove obviously any normal maps, but I'm going to open this up. I'm I'm going to just

put a a gross stone texture on top of it like this right here. Let's see if this this works for us. Go into here and we're just going to see how this looks for now. Okay, the unwrap is not great. Do I hate it? I don't think so. I don't think I hate it. Yeah, it's just going to have to be a bad unwrap. Unless we brought it into substance, but I think that is fine. Yeah, you're going to see some seams here like right there, but I don't hate it. You can get away with certain things with a retro game camera.
Mama mama Okay, there we go. Matchy matchy. Okay, have we done all of our assets? That's the question. No, we have not. We have water here. We want it to match the sky. That doesn't look right, but let's trust this process here. Yeah, there it is. It does match. Okay, there's our water. All right, let's go ahead and reduce the fidelity of our graphics and also make them loop perfectly and

tile perfectly. Oh my goodness, it's looking pretty good. What do you guys say? Are we getting there? I'm just going to go ahead and get the water done here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a big water plane here. All we're going to do is have that water tiling underneath itself and just moving in different directions. That's it and it's going to make it look like retro water. We're going to set it transparent here. There we go. So that is going to move like this and this is going to move like this. The tiling texture, I wonder if I already have a script for this. Looping texture. I do. I already have a looping texture script. So, we're going to use that. Uh all it does is creates a scroll for the base map. Uh we're going to set it to 0.1 by 0.1. Okay, I just wanted to get this out of the way. And for [snorts] the purposes of this, all I'm going to do is have one big huge water mesh like this. And we'll use terrain to sort of create a little lake. Okay, but I'm going to keep this here and we're going to set the tiling to like 5 by 5. There we go. I like it. Feel like we've got all of our assets, guys. Now we need to move into lighting

and
[sighs]
fog and ah yes, one final thing. I wanted to make a little a little plateau piece that we can use over and over and over again. I can go to my ProBuilder window here and I'm going to create a little loop cut. Okay, so this is just a cube and I could create a plateau here. And hey, let's go ahead and add a create a loop cut on this edge here and then insert an edge loop here as well. And the goal would be to create some kind of a a plateau piece like you see here and you could just insert it and wrap it around various parts of the terrain. Now, what do you notice about this? They've got an unwrap here that's really brilliant. So, we're going to try and mimic that as best as we can with our own texture. What we can do here is take our grass and I could do this. So, there's our stone trim. Now, what I can do is just add that, open up our ProBuilder window and I can just do it right here. And because this is one piece that we're going to use over and over and over again, I'll hang

on one sec. Hang on one sec. That was incorrectly added. Okay, that needs to be you need to add a material, not a texture, but there it is. Okay. I'm not sure why it's off-colored, but we're going to figure that out later. So, what you could do with this is you could take pieces like this and put them in places like that. More of a dirt texture on the side? Yeah, that's probably a good idea actually. Really good point. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. So, it looks like it's coming out of the ground. There we go. That's brilliant. Okay, I think I think we could should go ahead and start using a mosaic filter to start pixelating everything. Now, here's the truth. Ocarina of Time, everything is like fuzzy and blurry. I don't like that. I wish that it was crunchy. And so, I'm going to make it crunchy. I'm going to make everything look very crunchy. So, let's start with our sky. And I'm going to go ahead and filter pixelate mosaic. We're going to go a little bit more low-res here. We're just

going to play with this. See how it looks. Okay? Very crunchy. No, thank you. Okay, so it's a little it's a little early 2000s if I'm being honest. We might have to do a little bit of posterization. Let's do a posterize and see if that helps. It does. But, not that intense. Yeah, so posterize is going to reduce the amount of colors it can use. We're going to keep it like this and then we're going to move forward. And I'm probably going to end up tweaking the sky significantly to look a little bit more retro. But, let's move on to the terrain. Y'all, this is looking pretty good.
[laughter]
There are two ways to make your textures look pixelated. You can do it in Photoshop with the mosaic filter with a high resolution texture, or you can do it in Unity and change the pixel size in Unity. I like to do it in Photoshop despite the fact that this creates a massive file size. I like to do it in Photoshop because I have absolute

control over the pixel size and there's a lot more variability. However, before you ship your game, it's important to note if you're going to ship a retro game, there's no reason to ship high resolution textures that have a mosaic filter. So, you want to make sure at the end of the day you're reducing the pixel size before you ship your game. Okay, the sky is our biggest problem. It looks like a It looks like 2002 is what it looks like. I think that's good, my friends. It looks a lot better, thank God. Okay, I think we're ready to do lighting and fog. And we're going to do .1. How about .05? Directional light. Now, I'm going to do something and I'm going to make uh do soft shadows. Or we can do hard shadows. Right? Like that. So, everything's crisp. Is this uh era appropriate?

Probably not, but I like it. We haven't even done the level design yet, but now we have shadows, we have a pixelated sky. Do I have to see a seam? No, there's no seam. I thought there was a seam. There it is. No, there's no not a seam there. Okay, are we ready to do the terrain? And I think we are. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take all of these assets, I'm going to put them in a folder right now or a game object. I'm going to call these assets. Just so I know where they are, I'm going to disable them. Now, let's go ahead and create some really cool terrain. All right, let's feel it out. Don't underestimate the value of feeling it out. This actually feels pretty good. All right, let's go ahead and add our pathing. One of the ways you can do this is enter top view, go to paint texture. It helps to have lighting on cuz so you could see kind of the topology a little bit. And let's see here. My theory is we need to go pretty small.

It feels good. Hey, it's not the perfect path, but it's fine for my live stream. All right, remember those assets we had? What I'm going to do is move them over here. This is going to be our little asset bin. And let's go ahead and the first thing we're going to do is let's just put a the tower in the center and create some kind of castle motif in the middle. You definitely want to use ProBuilder for this. This is a pain. You definitely want to use ProBuilder for this or Blender for that matter. You know, I don't care what you use. That's not bad. This is a pretty good.
[laughter]
We definitely want like trees to surround this. So, I'm going to do that really quick. I'm going to create a tree quad. All right, like a forest quad. And it's going to be pretty big. We're going to do something like this.

And I'm going to go ahead and mosaic it. Not that much. We're going to make a smart object out of it. Hue, saturation. Remember it's kind of like greenish or yellowy green. This is going to be a tree line. Tree line billboard. There it is. And now we can frame it in so it doesn't feel so like a deserted desert, you know. Some of them need that be raised up. Trees grow in what Bob Ross says in families, right? And so, if it feels like they're spread out too much, you want to sort of group them together a little bit more. That looks off. I don't like that tower, actually. I don't know why. I can't put a finger on why, but we'll figure it out as we continue to work.

Let's see here. What would we do here? Well, let's go ahead and we're going to use ProBuilder one more time. Okay, watch this. I'm going to create a cube here. Okay, this is going to be our flag. Do you guys remember the that red color we had? We can use that to create a pop of color here for this flag. Now, what I can do because I'm using ProBuilder is I can open up ProBuilder here and then I can collapse these vertices or if I really wanted to for example I don't I could do this. I could do This is where we barely do modeling, okay? We're going to insert an edge loop. We're going to insert an edge loop here. Insert an edge edge loop here. Collapse these vertices. Collapse these vertices. Collapse these vertices. And then boom, there we go. All right, scale the globally. There we go, guys. All right, remember that red color? Save as and we're just going to go call this flag. And again, we could take a texture, an ugly texture, and just put it on top and it's going to look texturized. Going to have a subtle little texture to it, nothing crazy. All right, let's go ahead and throw on that red flag color.

And bro, we got a flag. Very good. Very, very good. And by the way, we are officially in that phase where you're just sort of playing and you're thinking through stuff. Just cleaning it up, cleaning it up, cleaning it up, cleaning it up. Next up, what did we have? Oh, we had fences, right? We had these these cool little fences here. Okay. Sweet. So far so good. Um I'm trying to think of any other things we need to add to the scene. Oh, the water, I forgot about the freaking water. Oh, this is going to be so great. So, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to put water over here and there was actually a a river on this side of Lake or Hyrule Field. So, we can do this. Isn't that cool how it just fills in? So, for now, what I'm going to do is actually make it even tiling. So, just

pull it back all the way over there and I'm going to move this terrain down so that we have a nice little lake over here. You see? Raise it here. There we go. All right. And those trees we can remove. Um we need a little bit of a we need like a rock right there. We'll do a little rock here.
[whistles]
Yeah, I'm going to crank up the saturation of this water. And we haven't pixelated it yet, so let's go ahead and do that. There we go. Save it. And then we want to make sure we use a hue shift of a value like this. Desaturate just a tad, actually. Okay, let's take a look. Matches the sky. Very good. All right, let's go ahead and find a summer soundscape. I'm going to go to artlist.io. Uh we're going to do summer ambience field.

This is great. And then we're going to find some music as well. So, right off the bat, look, this is how amazing the game feels with sound. Next up, music. This is where it just everything changes.
[music]
Yeah, this will work. Music is great, actually. So, let me show you how to crunchify things because that the music doesn't match. So, uh we can compress it. I did this a long time ago. Override sample rate. Yeah, we're going to do 11,000. Let's see. Yep. Uh same as with the ambience, we're

going to make sure we crunchify that. We're going to do um up override and we're going to do I'm going to do 8,000 for this one. You could barely even hear it. We're going to need to crank up the the volume for this. Yeah, no wonder.
[music]
I don't like that sound. So uh let's do uh summer forest ambience maybe. There we go. You want to hear birds. You You felt It feels really empty without the birds. There we go. Now obviously, guys, if you want to add a filter to it, which I'll probably do for the final cut of this, a low-res filter, you could do that. This is kind of how it looks. I'm just scaling it up. So, and then let's go ahead and uh crank up the contrast. This is what you could do. Okay? I don't know if I like this. The

nostalgia is is yanked out for me personally. But, you can do this. Oh, we forgot these guys. Sorry, one sec. Oh, these are so important. Sorry, guys. These are crazy important. Don't let me forget to put these in. These big chunky pieces, you could do this. And it just creates a dynamic looking Oh my word. How did I forget this? Mama. I kind of love this game. Uh Guys, do I do I need to make this? Oh man, that was really fun. Look at the before and look at the after. I love this. Also, remember if you're looking to streamline your development workflow, don't forget to check out Bezi. It's a development assistant that fully understands your project and it makes it very easy to create or modify code

directly in your projects at your approval and provides tailored suggestions specifically to your project. It's completely free for anybody to try and you can download it by simply clicking the link in the description.