The Truth About Making 3D Games (In Unity)

Okay, how exactly do you make a 3D game? It's an important question. I used to want to make games and in my brain I would think, okay, 3D games are made with maybe a bunch of like modular pieces and they're all stuck together like walls and ceilings and windows and doors. It's kind of like that, but not exactly. But then I also thought, well, maybe they do everything in Blender. Maybe the whole map is designed in Blender. Everything is baked into one giant model. Well, it's not that either. It's actually kind of different than all those things. In fact, my buddy Jason Smith, he's the creator of Cultic, he showed me how his first person shooter horror game, which is called Cultic, he showed me how it's all put together in Unity. There's a lot to learn here from an actual indie game developer who has overwhelmingly positive and very positive reviews for his games on Steam. So, let's jump inside of Unity and take a look at Cultic.
Dude, yes.
Are you Are you seeing my This is This is the bunker, the the penultimate map. And this is it is it it is a big big boy.

Okay, one sec. One sec. I'm going to turn on my fan. It's getting hot in here. It started getting really hot in here the moment you opened up Unity.
That it's weird how that [laughter] happens.
Oh, cool, dude. All right, take me through. And then I also want to see it in play mode, like so people can see like what it looks like behind the camera, which is crazy how much it'll change. Yes,
let me open let me open a map that's easier to visually parse because this map is a mess of triggers and vertically stacked stuff. I I'll open I'll open the first map in Coz, which will be less spoilery, too.
So, this is this is uh where's the spawn? Here's the spawn. So, this is E1M1. This is the and the auto map is kind of overlaid on everything right now. So, just I'll just turn that off. So, yeah. So, this is this is just in um this is just in like Unity's flat shading. So, this is um this doesn't have Cultic's color palette applied to it, but all of Coltic's texture work is done using the color palette. So,
wait, how's the color palette applied?
Uh, it's just a a post-processing like um color lookup table. So, it basically just quantizing quant quant.

Yeah.
Um so, yeah. And so, these are like these these brushbased interiors are like what we were using real time CSG for. I don't know if any of these are right. Can I see it in play mode without the quantizing?
Uh, yeah.
I want to see how bad it looks.
And I'm not trying to be mean. That's how it's that this way.
I feel the same way. I It kills me when I see people play Cultic without the pallet.
They can turn it off in the options.
Yeah. Uh, let me maximize this, too. Okay. So, this is with this is pallet on uh the new pallet, the V5 pallet. And then um actually let me get to somewhere where the lighting is a little more significant. We'll go out here where the pallet's a little more pronounced. Okay. And we'll we'll turn on the lighter too because you can you can really see the the limiting on the ground. So this is pallet on. We'll go and turn the pallet actually first. Uh so you can roll back to earlier versions of cultic pallet.

So this this is the original palette. [gasps]
It looks like the first one.
Yeah. very This is the OG pallet and then um I think V2 was what 1.0 launched with. Uh we're going the wrong direction here.
So this So V2 is what chapter 1 originally launched with. Um is this palette here.
Why did you change it?
Uh it's pretty much just anytime I anytime I identify a significant gap in the color palette, I add something into it. Yeah. [clears throat] So, like you can see here that like this this asphalt below me, which is actually a pretty detailed texture, is just like two shades of brown basically.
Yeah.
And then when we switch back to the version five palette, you'll see Oh, wrong direction again. You'll you'll see like how much more detail pops up in it.
Yeah. But you can't do too much because then it won't feel retro,
right? And then Okay. So then this we'll turn it off entirely. Yeah. Let's see. Filtering. We'll turn off dithering, too. So with it off, it looks
great.

I like I yes I'm proud of the texture work I did but like this [laughter] just so much looks like the standard Unity shader because it is this is all just standard Unity specular without
so like yeah with this turned off I just I die on the inside it oh it it kills me so much it's just like you lose but it's like the option is there for a reason I get that people won't like the pallet it the pallet has been has been kind of polarizing and controversial since day one so it's fine but still just like just like what what It's like you like, you know, like if you play the original Doom with texture filtering where everything is smoothed together like it's
Yeah.
It's a completely different look. And I
Well, let's zoom out now from now that I've we've seen this. Can we see now? Can we zoom out that same location?
And I'm not doing this because I'm trying to be controlling. I just know my audience like they're going to like to see the difference between what it looks like in editor. That's so cool, Jason.
Yeah. So this is the this is the big terrain blob of the map.

Yeah.
And then the area that we were just in here is the sun. And there's all these giant boxy these are all just like ambient sound and light triggers basically.
What tool [clears throat] is that? Is that
it's just a cube?
I know. But Oh, it's it's just a trigger. I see it triggers music.
Yeah, I just have um I just I just have a script that fades between light and audio zones. Um,
and so yeah, so this is the area we just spawned in. Um, it's all all we can turn on the actual uh lighting too. These these are so one of the big optimizations with um chapter 2 was consolidating lights. So like before like both of these lights had their own point light on them
and now there's one larger point light that's in between them and then they're they're just tied together. So if you break both of these lights the light goes away. This is a a big noob mistake that a lot of new 3D game developers

make. They think every light needs a light a point light.
Oh yeah. No, this is I I I was Oh, let me I was very guilty of this. That was one of the biggest obstations.
I exactly same here. And everything has a shadow. Um now for me it's like I found that one light looks way better than five because it's it's it's much more cinematic. You know,
originally on this on this part of map 2, every single one of these point lights, every single one of these light fixtures had a point light on it. And there were there were like
there was like 36 point lights on this structure alone. And so this like very low poly area was generating like
600,000 vertic or triangles. Y
and so now it's like this point light controls all six of these. Yes. And then these, you know, these ones control. And so that was like stuff like that was a huge game changer for
and they're also are they oluding out as well? Um
yeah. So like this um
they have a script on them or this cube.

Yeah. So this cube here basically I'll actually let me bring the inspector back. Um so this has a light portaling script on it that controls I guess that's not those lights. Anyway, so like it has it's just a a class I wrote that's called light portal and you it has a list of lights and then um any light that you drag. So like this is controlling like this light and then like this little burn barrel over here.
Cool.
And so whatever's in that list when you enter this square it turns on and when you leave the square it turns off.
Does it fade them in or does it just pop?
There there's a little float here that controls how fast they fade in or out.
Yeah. Um, so for like entering like a cave, like if you're walking into like this cave over here, the light fade is really slow. It happens over like three seconds. Yeah.
Um, but for areas where it's like once you leave, once you walk through a doorway, all the lights inside, it's like 30 30 frames and they're gone.
Now, people just so people who who are aware or listening who are I want them to be aware this is not some trivial

optimization like this is huge,
right? especially if they have got shadows,
right? Since since Unity or sorry, since Cultic is completely real time lit because I hate light b light baking. Um,
I do too. And it also doesn't look very good because you lose your specular and metallic. Light baking isn't as bad. I sound like a know-it-all. I'm sorry.
No, you're fine.
I've just been through the baking process with specular and metallic and I'm not sure you have.
I No, I I've tried baking a couple of times and in both times I was like, "This is awful. I don't want to I don't I don't like the workflow of baking.
Not only is baking hard with just a standard albido, you lose specular and metallic values. They're gone. They're wiped when you bake. And so you have to place a bunch of probes all over the place,
right?
There's no such thing as a metallic probe as far as I'm aware. So metallic values are gone.
And so if if you let's say you have a metallic map on let's say your crates, all of your crates are going to be black.
Yep.
If they have metallic values. So you

have to and you have to trick Unity because Unity doesn't have a way to bake metallic probes. Um
yeah,
so and if I'm wrong, let me know in the comments um if people are listening just because I want to learn and I want to know. But that's my experience. Another big optimization that something I just didn't know about actually until like this last year was um my thought process was that like if a point light uh like obviously way out here at the edge of your point light is when it's you're it's not really going to be affecting anything. But my thought was like like right now this this big cliff mesh here is getting rerendered by this light because they're touching. And my thought was that like if the light doesn't touch the mesh at all then it doesn't rerender it. And that is not correct. If the light if any part of this circle touches the bounding box of this mesh, which would be
wow,
which would basically be like, oh god, I didn't mean to do that. Which would basically be like a big like if you think of it like a giant square, the bounding box, if any part of it touches the bounding box,
which means that before this entire map,

all of this terrain was one mesh because it's it's relatively low poly. So like this entire mesh was like 1,700 triangles. And that's not a big deal until every single point light in the map is rerendering it. And so suddenly this 1700 triangle mesh is getting rendered 60 times and then more with shadows. And so then it turns into like 100k at any given time. I'm losing 100,000 triangles to to just the terrain. And so like the terrain wound up getting broken up into multiple meshes that are all oluded separately. And and like that was a huge optimization. And I just had didn't know it worked that way. So like real-time lighting, I love working with real-time lighting because it's like what you see is what you get. You don't have to sit through eight hour long, 20-our long bake times only for there to be some artifact you have to go and clean up and do it all over again.
Exactly.
And then like and then like you said, you lose a lot of that real time specular metallic data which is really

frustrating.
Yeah. I uh what's so funny is I spent three months maybe with Felipe learning light mapping and implementing it to every single level.
Uhhuh.
And by implementing what we had to do was we had to mark all of the correct objects as static
because you can't light map things that aren't static.
Y
and that's a huge undertaking. Um and then and then we also had to place all of our probes also. Yeah, we have like let's say 200 lights in a scene. We have to mark the ones that are baked as baked, the ones that are mixed as mixed. And by the mix, for the people who don't know, mixed lighting is the shadows can be dynamic. Um but the light source itself cannot I think
I think I think it's that the light contributes to um
that's also correct. GI. But
so like like if I if this barrel fire here were were mixed then it it would

apply to the baked map but then it would also apply real time to dynamic objects.
That's right. That's right. Um and then also finally you have to figure out what you want to be. That's how it works. [laughter]
Well for us to know everything would be ridiculous expectation but we I I'm going off of memory here. And then finally you you have your dynamic lights or your real-time lights which can be can move and and they affect all objects including static objects.
So we we did all of that only to find that the real culprit was shadows. That was the real culprit. And so all I did was I turned off all the shadows except for a few that were important.
And I had people say, "Oh, Thomas, that's terrible. Don't do that." But then I'd have testers play the game and they had no idea that the shadows were even off.
You want to see how I because I same conclusion realizing that when I'm when I'm pushing 2.8 million triangles on fairgrounds that almost half of it is

shadows and it's like this is fairgrounds the biggest map of chapter 2. It's a monster. But so what I did which which is like the same kind of cheat was I was like okay well when you are running this map there is a fog that limits your render distance because it's a it's snowing. It's supposed to be like a snowy map. B, I am cheating because I don't want to render more than I have to. And like all of these big orange cubes, these are all giant occlusion volumes that are just blocking your view of different parts of the map [laughter] to to like brute force because like cuz like when you're walking around on the ground level, you can like see through these fences. You can see through these trees.
So what I also found out was instead of turning off shadows altogether, you can limit how far away they render. And so this fog at like 50 meters away from the player, you can't see through this fog. So I just made it so shadows don't render past 50 meters away.
What do you know what your draw distance is for your shadows are right now?
Uh in this map it's 50 meters is what it's clamped to.
That's what it is in in Twisted Tower. It's it's a 50 or 60.
Yeah.
This is why for everybody most people

know this, but if you don't know this, it's a fun little fun fact. Why so many 90s games loved fog, right? And early 2000s games. This is why like High Fog feels nostalgic. It's because they're they have to use it. They have to callull things out at a very close distance.
Yeah.
So, Silent Hill must have been an easy game to make at least when it comes to like optimization because they just had dense fog, you know, 20 30 meters away from the player.
Yeah. And like and and definitely the quote unquote I guess right thing to do, you know, would have been to go through and individually all of these meshes like make sure that everything so like a lot a lot of the meshes in this map are combined so that they're only doing one like if if there's like if you're in this area there's no way that you're like not going to be seeing these buildings and so they're just merged together because what you in in game in optimization at least in Unity you've got what you call draw calls which is basically ally every time the if you if you think of your GPU as like you know

like an artist with like a paint palette and every time you want to change colors he has to like wash his brush off change to a different brush and then paint and that's kind of what a draw call is. It's basically the GPU putting its current tool down
and picking up a different one. And so these houses altogether are the same amount of triangles either way. But it can either be one draw call where it just draws all of them at once and then the GPU is done or it can be the GPU has to switch tools every single time. And there's probably some there's probably like a graphics programmer out there who's like that what an idiot. That is not how it works.
That that is so true. What you both things you said are true. I I believe what you said about the draw calls are true. But there is always
there is always someone who knows understands draw calls better. Oh, sure.
Because I've had I've had meetings with adviserss
with optimization. And I'm like, "Please help me understand draw calls."
Mh.
And so we'll sit and we'll do a whole meeting about how to optimize draw calls and I'll do everything that they said to do
and we'll we'll merge meshes all this stuff and then the draw calls are the

same. And
it's like what is happening? So all I found was the the if you want lowhanging fruit with optimization, kill the shadows.
Kill them and just do one light
that has a really cool shadow. Like for example, a shadow of that Christmas tree.
Yeah. And so like shadow
this area used to have like like each of these strands of lights had its own point not not each bulb but each each line had its own point light and then the tree had its own point light and then these lamps had their own point light and then these barrels had their own point light and so when you walk into this area your frame rate just like gets cut in half
and and just because it's like you have to render like all of this stuff you have to render all these props and cultic voxil models are really expensive because they have a lot of little triangles in there. Um, and so this like this area was tough. And so it it came down to like meshing all of these together so that they render one time and they they aren't because otherwise it's like every single point light that touches these renders them. Um, but

there's times you don't want to do that. Like let's fly I'm going to turn lighting back off. I fly way over here. Um, we'll do like um like I don't remember. Okay, so these houses are all cold. These ones are not all combined together because in this case, if you're standing right here, you can't see any of these buildings. And so these can be called out separately. Yes.
But if you're standing over here, you can see these ones, but like you know, you might not necessarily be able to see this one or this one. Um, and so like this was a situation where it didn't really seem like no matter where I stood here when they were all meshed together, I was never saving anything. But because of how tall these tents are and how tall these buildings are and how tall these trees are quite frequently, I could be in a spot where I only have to render one of these buildings at a time. Like if I'm standing here, I only need to render like these maybe these two buildings because I can't see these at all.
And so in that case, merging these together wasn't saving me anything.
Yeah.
But yeah, this map this map sucked to to

optimize. It took so many passes.
Can we can we shift gears and take a look at an interior? Because interiors are different.
Yeah. At least in my experience. By the way, I wanted to say
uh it's gonna when Twisted Tower comes out, it's going to look like I ripped you off. Okay, I'm just gonna say it out loud.
We have a level called Fairground Forest and we made it a year and a half ago.
Uhhuh.
Um, so either one of us ripped each other off or neither of us did, which that's my assumption.
We conspired together to rip each other off.
So I have a forest level in Twisted Tower, which is like carnival tents and stuff.
Yeah. So sorry. I'm sorry if it looks that way, but that's what
everybody every game inspires something else.
Well, I didn't see this is what I'm saying. I had no idea. I had no idea.
I I believe you. Don't worry. So, we'll do So, we'll go the opposite direction. So, the fairgrounds was this massive sprawling wide openen map. And then the this is the manor, which is Nick's baby. This was pretty much his map. That was
Does Nick like Castlevania 64?

Nick loves Resident Evil. Uh, so I
This feels like the villa in Castlevania 64, but go ahead.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like, so like I I decorated it, did the texturing, set up the encounters, blah blah blah, but the layout was was all was all him. I'm going to I'm going to turn the auto map off so we can so we can see what we're looking at. Um,
it looks so good, Jason. I love this Victorian flare. Oh
yeah. And uh and this map was like almost all original assets. Like all like almost everything in the manor I had to make for the manor. Like I didn't have these wooden doors or this wooden trim or the cuz like everything in Cultic up to this point had mostly been like rundown dilapidated structures. Um but then we're like okay well if we want to make a fancy a fancy Resident Evil mansion like I we're just going to have to make a bunch of stuff. U but so yeah we'll do we'll do in editor here for this.
Yeah I want to see how it looks and then can you talk to us eventually about how I'm going to assume that this is not all modular. turn the pallet back on.
That
uh No, [laughter] that would have been

that would have been a lot a lot of Unreal developers,
and I hate to call out Unreal developers, everything's modular.
They've got like a billion walls that are making a room.
Um, and I would love to talk about how you're putting this together. I'm sure some of it's modular.
Yeah.
A lot of a lot of it's dressing and a lot of it is just big fat meshes. um for an entire hallway or an entire room is an entire, you know, mesh. This looks incredible, dude. Oh, I love this aesthetic. See, this is what I was talking about earlier, how don't throw your I'm not saying you're gonna, but don't don't forget what your forte is. This looks so good, dude. Yeah, we the manor was a ton of fun. Um, but so the manor is like the opposite I'm going to leave leave play mode again so I get some frame rate back. The manner is like is the polar opposite of um actually I lied. I can I can show you this in the auto map and then you'll actually see what the layout looks like.
Oh, sweet. You want to show off your auto map?
I do. Well, it's easier than trying to

look through all the ceilings and and triggers and uh so we'll just do a full map reveal here. And I could turn the auto map back on would also help a lot with that because I switched it off so we can see.
Oh, right. Yeah, you need that.
Yeah, turning automat back on is a is a big help. And then I have to re I have to reveal it. and then rem maximize my view. Okay, so here is here's the manor and it's all unexplored so it's all a dark color but so this is the extremely tight interior of the manor like that dining room that I was just showing off that is that is this room here. I'm going to increase the size of my coing here. Um so that's the the dining room that we were just in is this little the relatively small room here.
Yeah.
And then we're uh I'll turn the mask back off. So that and then this is the the whole of the manor. So it's very tight, very compact, lot of rooms. Surprisingly, it's a pretty linear map all things considered. But yeah, so this is and this is just what Nick is really good at is like just like connecting box

to box to box to box and just like throwing these areas together. That's just
Well, if he likes Resident Evil, it explains a lot, you know, because
the the the whole fun of Resident Evil is,
I guess, backtracking and and going to old rooms that you remember, you know, and revisiting areas. It's so exciting.
And then it's still got an outdoor segment, so we still got to play around with like some some
directional light or is it just ambient lighting?
Uh, there is there is a a directional for outdoors for getting for
turn on.
Uh, yes. So, like I wanted to be able to I wanted to be able to get these shadows through this lattice. And so, like that I had to get from a directional light. But yeah, if you're like inside certain zones of the manor, like if you're in a room like this, u this light zone
will disable the directional light because you can't see it and it the directional light creates a bajillion shadows no matter what.
Well, show me really quick, Jason, how you're putting this level together. What are the various chunks and pieces? Yeah. So, there is a lot of stuff that is

prefabbed. Um, in terms of decorations, like let's uh let's go in here. So, like this table is a prefab. These suits of armors are prefab. So, like at any at any point in time,
um you know, for prop work, I can drag a uh you know, like I can drag one of these in here and put it put it wherever and and cost myself a bunch of frames because these voxels have a bajillion triangles in them. Um but then like the map itself is what we used real time CSG for. Um, and I have to convert it back to a a usable model real quick, which Unity is really going to enjoy. Okay, so when it's when it's in an edible state, this these are all brushes. So this so this you can just kind of like click and drag and it's all it's all boolean. So like if I wanted to add a window here that looked outside,
you just and make a box and I drag it out and hey, look, now I've got a window. And of course, I still have to texture it and and uh, you know, would have to redo collisions for it. But this workflow of just being able to like punch a door or a window wherever is awesome for a game like this. The

downside being that besides real-time CSG being unsupported and really buggy now is that you are kind of limited to this kind of low relatively low poly geometry like um uh let me let me pull up a tab here of um like the the hammer editor. So, the hammer editor that Valve uses for Source games is is is very similar. It's it is also brushbased. Um, but of course, this was used to make like Left 4 Dead. Um, actually, let's see if
Explain Explain to people listening what you mean by brush based,
right? So, um, it's uh, every single one of these shapes is called is is referred to as a brush. Stop selecting my light zones. Stop it. [laughter] That's that's the other problem. these big triggers. It's like, did you want to click on this? No, I didn't want to click on that.
Um, okay. I'm just going to disable all these light zones because they're killing me.
Um, so like, yeah. So, like each this this room Oh my lord, stop selecting my

triggers. Like every single shape here, so like this shape here is a big subtractive brush. So like this dining room. So Nick did all these and his workflow is a little different than mine, but like this dining room here probably started as one big additive cube.
Yes.
Um and then this is a smaller subtractive brush that cuts out from the middle of it. And then like these pillars are additive cylinders, but they are also brushes. So this is boolean geometry where you're just adding and subtracting versus like ProBuilder um or or modeling in Blender where you're like you are permanently changing geometry. Like if you wanted to If you wanted to cut that window out of this wall in this case where you're just you can you're this is what we would call constru that's what CSG stands for. I think it's constructive solid geometry is because it's constructive. It's kind of like working with layers in Photoshop. Instead of directly painting onto something I can paint onto a layer and I can move that layer around. I can edit

that layer and or I can just delete it and my base product is not changed. The end result will likely be the same as the end result of a ProBuilder mesh in the sense that how it's being achieved is using loop cuts and extrusions and and cutting off faces and stuff,
right?
But but it it means that it's non-destructive. Now, do you end up do you end up um baking it basically and and and removing the brushes? Well, so the brushes stay like they exist, but yeah, when you're done, there's um there's this export to Unity mesh. And that basically turns it into it basically takes every material, so every different texture, and turns that into its own mesh. And so that's how I go through and assign like collision materials so that when you're walking on this wooden floor, it plays wooden floor sound effects because that floor is tagged as a wooden object.
And so like the hammer editor, like Left 4 Dead, for example, if you like we'll look at this screenshot. So like this

big like air conditioning unit, these boxes on the wall, this air conditioner up here, the the stairwell, those are all prefabs. And and Cultic uses some of this too. Like I have um I have stairs because stairs are are a nightmare to do using brushes.
So like I have like this like little like wooden stair or metal stairs prefab that I use. And so that is just a mesh and I and so they're aligned on a grid so I can just snap them together super quickly whenever Unity unfreezes. But um yeah, so like I have prefabs like that I can use because there's some stuff like like this. I'm not going to build this suit of armor out of brushes. That's that would be a mess. Like I'm not going to build, you know, like some of the stuff out of meshes or out out of brushes. Um and so that's kind of but then like this building here, even though it has like a high def texture with like normal mapping, it's a cube. Like you can see it's a cube.
Um you know, like like this this this helicopter pad, it's a cube. This building is a cube. And so um that's where you go back. I don't know if they have like a editor view of it, but yeah,

like hammer editor is is is a more a more capable version of real-time CSG. And so I would love to use a tool like this and and Unreal is getting one in the form of the scythe editor, which is awesome. And I'm super jealous that they get to have that.
Golly, where is Unity? God.
Oh, yeah. Here's a here's a here's like a Left 4 Dead custom map that you can see. And so like you can see here, like this is a building and it's like it's a cube and it's a triangle roof. Um, and yeah, it's uh, and this is looking at it in a very uh, chaotic view, but
yes,
but it's it's the same thing. So, yeah, um, Unity or sorry, Cultic does I do use prefabs. I do have stuff, you know, like this that that's a prefab. I made it in Blender. I just drag it and drop it here. But when it comes to building rooms and and and cutting out doorways and and just iterating on that, all of this is brush work because trying to do this where like
if we were doing this in Blender and I decided instead of this room just having a flat square corner, I'm going to add these these two pillars and this and this this diagonal and I'm going to add this rounded platform. If I decided I

didn't like any of that and I don't have enough undo states to go backwards or I didn't save a backup of it, I have to like delete all of these vertices and reconnect these and redo all the UV mapping. But with this constructive solid geometry with brushes, I just delete the brushes and then it's back to where it was before, which is super duper helpful. But I don't know how well that will scale to a high de like I don't know how well you could even do this with like twisted tower, you know, like to where you're saying
this is the same thing. In fact, I I I was gonna argue with you about that. Actually, you mentioned earlier, you were like, I don't know how helpful this would be for a high fidelity game, right?
I think high fidelity games are doing the same thing.
Yeah.
I think they're starting with ceilings, floors, and walls, and that's it's all just flat. It's either quads or cubes.
Mhm.
And you you the set dressing is what make that that the texture fidelity and the set dressing is what makes it look good.
Yeah. But dude, I there are so many asset packs on the Unity asset store and

also the Unreal whatever the Unreal asset store is where the walls, ceilings, and floors are the prefab are also prefabs.
Sure.
And that is the a nightmare to work with. Um and so to everybody listening, you've got to start with a base mesh that is similar to what um Jayce is doing. Well, and I think like I think like even like Elder Scrolls, I think like in like Skyrim even I don't know if I could find a good picture of it, but a lot of their a lot of like Skyrim's dungeons like the caves are also modular. Like they just have these like like these like rocky tunnels and ceilings and they and they kind of just like stitch them together and that's how they make, you know, all of these instances like so quickly, you know, like you can look at I think this is this is not from Skyrim. Maybe it is, but it's like a lot of it when you if you like if you like break it down into assets, it's it's a lot of large boulders and large uh you know like just like generic ground pieces like outdoors like we'll take this example like the

like there there is a terrain mesh here that is the flat outdoor terrain. But then like this cave is like like this rock here is probably a prefab. This rock is a prefab. These little these little cliffs that stick out are prefabs and it's all just sitting on a te on a terrain mesh and the textures are blended together in a way that makes it look like this is all just like one hand modeled thing.
That's right. And so yeah, I mean there's just like a middle ground because like for a lot of Twisted Tower or any game like cuz like I said like Left 4 Dead which you I mean that was a 360 era game and so it's definitely not like a retro shooter but when if you if you kind of stand back and look at it
a lot of the like the rooms like you said about set dressing like this room I'm standing in it looks like a like a living room in in an apartment but if if I like mentally delete the furniture and and the light fixtures and everything it is it's a square. like the room is a cube. Um, and then it's just between like the textures on the walls have molding like you like molding on the top and bottom and then like the

floor has like garbage textures on it to make it look like it's cluttered and then you've got furniture and you and so yeah. So like I don't know I would really I would love to keep using real-time CSG but unfortunately it supposedly it doesn't work at all in Unity 6.
I would say whatever your decision is just from experience using ProBuilder which is destructive. It's not a boolean based
uh level designer. I would say do it. Use boolean based. That's amazing. I I can't believe we made Twisted Tower without this tool. I don't know what we were thinking.
Um Well, it definitely it definitely has it definitely has its downsides, especially cuz like like to give an example, like this little door molding thing, right? Like this would have been a a gigantic pain in the butt to build for every single doorway. And so that I was like, "No, I'm just going to model it in Blender and and use it as a prefab." And so like the higher fidelity your game world is, the more often you'll have to do stuff like that. And I imagine there's a certain point where it's not worth it to do to do CSG

anymore because like you're just like it's like every other thing you do, you're having to build from scratch. Well, this is this is I kind of disagree with you and I don't know what the industry standard is, especially AAA, but uh boolean the whole reason bullion is effective is because it allows for iterative level design.
Yeah, that's true.
You're never going to get you're never going to get a good idea of what your if your level design is perfect until like you're not going to get it right the first time is what I'm saying.
Yeah.
And so you need to be able to adjust and change things. But anyway, dude, I've got a pee. [laughter] You've been holding that for three hours, huh?
I have. But this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you so so so much for your time. Every time you come on, it's so much fun. I mean, obviously, this is the longest podcast I've done. This by far this one's the longest one. So, congratulations.
Yeah, you you can't you can't have Midwesterners on here and expect me to not [laughter] not talk forever.
I know. I love it. All right, man. Well, hey, what do you want in the the

description? You want any links in the description?
Uh, you know what? I think I think we're good for now. You can if you've got my Twitter link in there, we'll be good. I'm
okay. You don't want chapter 2 in there?
No. Well, we'll let we'll let people they can play chapter one first and then we'll they'll decide if they want to play chapter two.
So, especially with Especially with the warning they've gotten now that it is it is scarier and harder and not exactly the same experience.
Cool. All right, man. Uh thank you so much for your time.
Yeah, it's always fun chatting. We'll talk to you later.