Workshop: How To Make A 3D Game (With No Experience) Day 2

Welcome, welcome. Look guys, this is going to be a fun live stream and what I want to ask you to do is say a prayer. Say a prayer that we learn a ton today and that the Lord grants us and blesses us with all sorts of knowledge about how to make a 3D game. Come on in, guys. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I think we're good. Are we live? Are we live? Let me double check. And by the way, while I double check, I want to say a huge, huge thank you. Huge thank you to live. Loic, we are live. Okay. Loic, Whitney, Montreal, Martin, Andreas, Anthony, Brian, Seth, Lorenzo, Victor, Robert, Lewis, Benji, Leonardo, James, and all those other people because I already shouted them out yesterday. If your name isn't on this list and you and you enrolled in the course yesterday, um I did not have time today to put you on the list, but but during Monday's live stream, we'll do a big update with all the new people who

have joined. Thank you so much. Huge, huge thank you. I mean, it means the world to me that you guys enrolled during the Black Friday and Black Friday sale for my massive course called Full-Time GameDev. And by the way, if you want to join Fulltime GameDev, you still got nine days left to join the program. This is it, guys. This is the one. If you want a course that's actually taught by a real indie game developer, like somebody who's actually in the trenches making indie games, if that's something you're interested in, then this is the course for you. There's a lot of courses on Skillshare or what else? Uh, there's another one, Udemy. They're not taught by indie game developers, like real indie game developers. I'm kind of an enigma. I love YouTube. I love teaching, but I'm also pretty good at making indie games. I'm pretty good at making indie games. I'm on my third commercial release signed by my third publisher, and in this case, it's 3D Realms, and I'm making a big 3D game called Twitch the Tower. This course is going to teach you everything from coding in C. You can

learn in Unity, Unreal, or GDAU, any engine you want to learn. It's available in the course. Take your pick. But you're also going to learn how to secure funding from from publishers. You can just learn how to do Kickstarter campaigns and be get funded on Kickstarter. Thomas, why should we listen to you? Well, I've done all those things. You can look it up. Just Google Thomas Brush Kickstarter. You'll see um both of my campaigns basically raised $100,000. Uh just shy of $100,000 for my second one. Uh you're going to learn how to, you know, hit the Steam front page. I've done that. You're going to listen uh learn how to get streamers to play your game. I've done that. Jack Septic Game Grumps has played my games. Matt Pat's played my games. PewDiePie's played my games. Although, full disclosure, I made a game for PewDiePie, so that's a little bit different. Um, but on top of that, on top of that, you're going to get my 2D art program, my 3D art program, my YouTube how to do YouTube content, you're going to get that program completely free. Those aren't just throwaway courses. Those are highv value courses that I I used to sell at a premium, but for this sale,

totally free. And you got nine days left. Look, this is massive. You've got 60 seats left. Um, we're almost halfway through the available seats. So, if this is something you're interested in, click the link below, check it out, and I'll give you a shout out on Monday's live stream. And by the way, if you're a student in my programs, let me know in the chat what you think about them. Seriously, I would love to know. Um, this is me telling you the audio is peing, so don't come at me with you didn't tell me. [laughter] So, um, here we go. Here we go. Am I peing? Really? Check. Check one two and two. Check one two and two. Why is it always freaking picking? Um, stop. Hey guys. Um, you're trying to make a back rooms game. Okay. Well, let's let's jump in and figure out how to make a back rooms game. Okay. All right. We good, guys? Everybody good? Ready to go? Thomas, do you think the p cuff bus game is failed? Uh, it it doesn't look like it did well.

And and that's okay. Sometimes games don't do well. That's okay. You know, it's a really hard thing. I'm going to I'm just going to It went from low to high. How's that? Check. One, two, and two. Check. Check. Check. Um, something I have to say about games that fail. I have a lot of sympathy for YouTubers who put themselves out there and are willing to teach. I mean, obviously because I'm I'm doing that right now and but they're also making games and they're putting themselves out there and giving advice and then they're putting games out there and that's a scary thing to do because your credibility is on the line. Gavin didn't have to do any of that. He didn't have to make a YouTube channel teaching how to make games. Gavin's a great developer. He's smart. He's really smart. And I'm sure he'll come back from this for sure. Um, and I love him and I wish him the best. And sometimes you sometimes you release bad games. That's okay.

Good on him for releasing a game. Can we give a round of applause? Applause emojis to Gavin for even releasing a game. I mean, that's amazing that he released a game that has that level of polish. Okay, is that good, guys? Good volume. Check one, two, and two. Okay, so yesterday we left off just talking about lighting. And by the way, I've got this really, really ugly normal map. And and maybe some of you even noticed it yesterday. Um the normal map is on our wallpaper and it's also on our carpet. I'm going to remove that normal map completely. Why is it not removing? Something's going on. Oh, it's on my detail mask. [snorts] So, we're going to remove the detail mask entirely.

A detail mask is is a detail is just a it's a secondary layer that you could put over top of your standard layer. I don't need all this right now. Okay, very simple. The carpet as well. We don't need that at all either. Okay, so let me remove that. Um, and let's get started. Today's going to be fun. Okay, we're going to talk about how to make a game in Unity. Um, a 3D game in Unity. And and specifically, we're just going to focus on, okay, how do we make like a back rooms game because believe it or not, that's actually one of the easiest. I think if I had to make a a game really quickly and back rooms wasn't oversaturated, I would definitely make a back rooms game. Okay, so here we go. We've got our back rooms g uh map that we created yesterday. I removed those ugly normal maps. We're not going to worry about normal maps for the purposes of this workshop. Um, is it worth staying here if I'm an Unreal dev? Absolutely. Look, tons of crossover with 3D. Uh, tons of crossover.

Uh Kyle, go ahead and email Thomas at fulltimegamedev.com and we'll get you sorted. Okay. If you're already a full-time gamedev student, absolutely. You should be able to get uh the YouTube course if you if you recently bought full-time gamedev. So, um I think that's totally fine. Okay, guys. The thing I wanted to focus on today were three things. Okay, I'm going to pull up my list of things. This is it's a lot. It's a lot today. Okay. And I was thinking, well, what are we going to talk about today? And then all of a sudden, it was like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. All these things that I wish people would have told me when I started making 3D games. I just wished they would have told me about these things. We could talk briefly about lighting cookies. We're going to talk about the difference between a point and a spotlight. And I know what you're thinking. I already know that. Nuh-uh. I will tell you something that you don't know about spotlights that is crucial. Absolutely crucial. Point lights in particular. Um,

it's it's a big deal. I'll tell I'll tell you in a sec. Mix versus real time versus baked lighting. Okay, this is all so important to you guys. A lot of game developers just put tons of stuff into their games and they don't know anything about lighting and then, you know, [snorts] two years down the road, they're wondering why their game runs like trash on Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck or even PC. And I'm going to show you tell you all about that stuff with lighting. We talk about decals, not the technical side of it, but like the value of it. I'm going to play some decals and show you why they're so important. Okay, we'll talk about texture variation, lighting, animation, sound triggers, set dressing, optimization, inclusion, coloring. So, we're going to do our best here to hit all these things. Are you guys ready to roll? But let's hit play here and just feel out how this um this backrooms level feels. Now, the sound is going to be wrong. So, I'm going to hit play here and we'll take a look at the sound. The sound is all wrong. I was just putting this in here yesterday just to wrap up, but we're

going to adjust the sound here and the lighting to make it feel more like backrooms. Okay. All right. Here we go. [snorts] First things first, backrooms. Back rooms. Let's study the lighting of backrooms. And how do we get that vanilla ugly lighting? How's this accomplished? There's something in particular about this lighting here that is very disturbing. Now, you notice it doesn't go dark really. There's not really any fog. We're not going deeper and deeper into fog. So, how exactly is this lit? This one is. This goes darker and darker, which I kind of like, but some of these have no fog. this one that's got a dark fog. Okay, so let's try and figure this out. Let's figure

out how do we make this look like back rooms. Okay, so right now pretty dark. I'm going to turn off the uh ProBuilder so we can just see it in its current form. Okay, it's pretty dark. So my theory is is that the environment we need a little bit of lighting here. We're going to do a color environment light. This is on the lighting tab. And this just allows us to pump up just a little subtle amount of light. We're going to do a little bit of white here. Just barely. So weird. Why is it doing that? Unity's environment lighting is just trash. You just want those shadows to fill in subtly. Okay. I'm also going to turn off the fog. Okay. The fog's already turned off. Turned turned off. Um, this is what it looks like on. Something like this, right? And this is off. Okay. So, what I'm going to do here

is I'm just going to boost up our lighting a little bit. Okay. And we talked about this yesterday, but you don't really want practical lighting in your game. Not really. I like to put my lighting after I place lights. So, what I mean is if I place like a ceiling light like this, these two lights don't actually do anything. I place the lights after the fact. Okay? Like this. I don't I don't really like lights practically lighting the scene. And that means it's realistic and that it's actually coming from the source. That kind of drives me crazy because oftentimes you'll have like 30 lights in a scene when really you could accomplish it with one. Okay. So, I'm going to do something like this. Okay. Uh, let's make our ambient light a little bit more yellow. There we go. I wonder if there's any post-processing going on causing the scene to look a little bit green. I

think there is. So, that's I'm going to turn off post-processing for just a sec. And we're going to try and figure out why this green is this green color is happening. Okay. Because it's really yellow that we want. Yeah. That's the wallpaper. So, the wallpaper's a little green, isn't it? So, let's make it a little bit more yellow. Again, I can open up my Photoshop textures. And they're not JPEGs, okay? They're Photoshop files. So, I can quickly make adjustments um to go a little bit more yellow here, for example, and save it. And then it'll become more yellow really quickly. Does that make sense? So, let's hit play here and take a look. [sighs] Still a little green.

Cool. And we're going to change the music and sound in a uh music and sound a in a second here. Wow, I can't say that. Let's bump up the saturation of the yellow and maybe go a little bit darker with our fog. Okay. So, we'll bump up the saturation here. Again, we can just go into Photoshop here. And we're going to create a new hue saturation layer here. And just bump up the yellow. See if that fixes it for us. Just hit save and jump back in. Here we go. Sweet. What about the carpet? The carpet is Yeah. needs a little bit more saturation, I would say. Maybe bump up the lightness here. A little bit of that. There we go. Go back into Unity here and we'll go to our carpet. and the carpet. I think we just need to bump up the the color of the or the yellow color just a little bit here. Yeah, let's try that. Take a look. There we go. Feeling a little bit more back rooms, wouldn't you say? All right. And the sha we're going to add a little bit of fog here.

We'll do 0.1. And you could just test it out and say, "Okay, do I like the red? Do I like the white? Does it need fog?" No, because back rooms actually feels dry. It doesn't feel like there's a lot of moisture in back rooms. So, I kind of like that. I'll turn off the music in a second. Yeah, there we go. Feeling pretty backroomsy. I like it. Okay, remember we did shadows yesterday? Well, now you notice that we can't see the shadows. Why is that? Well, we filled in the ambient light, so that means all of our shadows are a lot less dark. So, we need to make sure we strengthen our shadows right here. That makes me feel like I we need to bring the ambient light down just a little bit. There we go. I don't like perfectly dark halls. Personally, that's not my cup of tea. I like to be able to see a little bit down

there. And we'll go a little bit more yellow. There we go. And I'm going to just pump this down just barely. I think that's what we want. Okay, guys. Got the general vibe down for our back rooms environment. By the way, let me know in the chat who likes back rooms. Who likes back rooms? I love the back rooms. There is something deeply nostalgic, deeply it's it's it's living inside of me. It's been living inside of me since I was born. Something about the backrooms, in my opinion, it feels like it might actually exist. It It's so weird. The back rooms is something that is deep in our psyche, especially if you're a millennial. I don't know why. That's good tea, man. Holy shikes. That's good. Uh, okay. This is also causing shadow problems. I can delete

that. See? And then bring this one down. If you're ever struggling to see, you're like, where are my shadows? It could be that another another light is filling in those shadows of the of another light. So, you have to be very careful with where you're placing shadows. Okay. All right. But we can, if we want, crank up this brightness, but you don't want to go too hot. Okay. This This right here, let me show you this right here, guys. That's too hot. We're not watching a movie by Darren Areronowski in 2002. We need to pump it down. You never want the shadows to be perfectly black, in my opinion, nor do you want the highlights to be too hot or perfectly white. You want a nice balance, very subtle balance. And this is this is definitely that's it. That's it. That is our back rooms environment. Now, you might be tempted to go, well, let's make it more yellow like backrooms. No, no, no, no. Keep it

natural light. If guys, look at the lights around you in your room. They're all a very They're barely white. They're barely warm. [snorts] They're barely warm. Okay, [sighs and gasps] so that looks great here. Let's uh go ahead and take a Those shadows look really good, too. By the way, if you're just joining us, remember you can get 50% off full-time gamedev if you want to support the channel, but also obviously support your future because I think it's a great course. I really do. You're going to learn so much. Everything I've learned in the last decade of making indie games, you're going to learn. I love the way this looks. I want to eat it up and put it inside my mouth. I really do. I want to I want to add some trim here, too, and trim there. But we're not going to do that because we got to focus on the various topics that we're learning about. So, am I going too fast or are you guys ready to move on to the next topic? Oh, I forgot to send an email to my subscribers. Hang on. Send email. Hold on. I got to send this

email, guys. Sorry. Um, three, two, I'm so paranoid about sending emails because it's like to 70,000 people and I'm like, did I post a link on accident in the email that's like really really bad? [laughter] I don't know. Some kind of weird link that I didn't accident that I accidentally put in the email or something or like a link to like a Discord chat or something. [laughter] It's like to 70,000,000. We're good. Yes. We're so good. We're ready to go. All right. Here we go. Bad. Okay. All right.

Yeah, we're good to go, guys. Okay guys, I sorry I had to send that email. All right, let's open up Unity here and um let's move on to the next topic which is sound. Okay, back rooms is just very simple um very very simple like what would you say a buzzing of a of a of fluorescent lights. So, let's go ahead and type in backrooms fluorescent light. I I guarantee you this exists. Sounds 10 hours in the back room. So, here's one. I'm just going to grab this one off YouTube. Okay, we're going to grab this one off YouTube. Thomas, how you going to do that, buddy? I have this thing called 4K

video downloader, which it you shouldn't be using these sounds. Okay, you should be making your own sounds or use royalty-free ones. Um, but we're just going to use this for the purpose of this tutorial. I'm going to paste this. Give me just a second. I'm going to paste this link here um for MP3. Paste the link inside of my 4K video downloader. Um, here it is right here. There we go. Thank you, Urban Outcast. Thank you. Um, we're going to let this download here. This is 10 hours in the back rooms. Holy crap. We don't need 10 hours, but we're going to [laughter] we're going to let it download. [snorts] Um, and we're just going to bring this into into Audacity. And then we're going to cut it up. We don't need 10 hours. Okay. So, we want to be efficient and we're going to maybe choose 30 seconds

of this sound and we're going to make sure it loops perfectly. What you don't want is oh my goodness, the conversion is going to take forever. [snorts] We're going to let that download and load and we're going to move on to the next topic. Okay, the next topic is the difference. We're not going to worry about cookies. I mean, cookies are pretty straightforward, guys. There's nothing really here to talk about other than cookies can create sort of textures with your lights like this. And they're just black and white images, okay? Like this cookie here. Um it's uh and I like to just get these on the asset store. There's no reason to build these custom. Just get some free cookies on the asset store. Everybody likes a free cookie. Okay, so we're not going to worry about cookies because that's straightforward. I want to tell you guys a secret about mixed I'm sorry, point lights versus spotlights. Who can guess what my secret

about point lights and spotlights are? Can somebody guess what the secret is? It has to do with optimization. Can anyone guess what the difference between a point light and a spotlight is on the optimization side of things? Can anybody guess? Yeah, we're going to talk about baked lighting. We'll talk about baked lighting.
[snorts]
Can anybody guess what that is? How's this? Okay, it's converting. It's going to take a while. It's just a few a huge file. Um, well, if you can't points are six times slower. Good. Good. Okay. So, why why are point lights slower? Point lights have shadows. No. Spotlights have shadows. Point lights are special. No. Point lights are basically it's either

four or like six spotlights. That's really what a point light is. It's lights pointing in every direction. One, two, three, four, five, six. That's insane. If you're in a situation where you can use a spotlight, use a spotlight. Use a spotlight. Do not use a point light. And I'm going to have to go through Twisted Tower and replace every point light with spotlights. I'm going to go to through each one and fine-tune it to increase optimization. It's just it's sadly it's just going to have to be something I do because I learned this after the fact. So, for example, can we get away with a spotlight in this room? Uh, maybe, probably not. Okay, probably not. But what if we'd had, let's say, for example,

what if we had a light here? I don't know, a light decal here. Where did the light decal go? It's over there. What if we had this over here? And it was like uh actually I could just type in there's a cool little hospital light that I really like that we use in the game sometimes. There it is. There's hospital ceiling light and then there's a wall light here. Come on. There it is. That's the one. So, we have this hospital wall light here. Okay. Look. Look how it came default out of the package and from the asset store. Okay. It looks great, right? Looks really good. No issues, no complaints, except for the fact that this the point light is useless. We're uselessly using a point light. I'm going to assume it's a point light. It is. Now, you might be thinking, "Well, Thomas, what if it's like near what if there was a wall right here? You would

want that point light." Yeah, that's true. But you don't in this room. So, that's why you got to kind of be It's so sad. You got to be kind of picky and and specific about which uh lights you use. That's why in my opinion, lighting is more of a you just make a game look amazing with point lights. This is my theory at least. You just put them all over the place. Make them all real time. Don't worry about optimization. Then when the game is done, then you go in and you fine-tune. Especially if you're making like a linear story game or like a horror game or something. So, this is why I would I would use a spotlight here. Okay, a spotlight is much more efficient, especially if you're making a game for like, let's say, Switch 2. You would use a spotlight like this. Now, that looks a little ugly. So, what we're going to do is make it look not ugly. It's one thing

that I hate about lighting, especially in a lot of indie games, is it's very sharp. It's like this. It's like that looks horrible. Instead, you want to do this. Very soft and subtle. Soft. Soft is a word you're going to hear a lot, especially in like, let's say, the film industry. Um, when you're doing lighting, you want it to be very subtle, very soft. Now, that's that's where you start to see that it's a spotlight. See that? So, you want to be very very careful with how you're using your light. So, I think soft, very subtle like this is fine. So, that's how you can kind of get away with spotlights. Does that make sense, guys? Okay, so that's the difference between a spotlight and a point light. Spotlights

are really things that are much they're much they're a sixth of the cost of a point light. That's what I've heard. But um they're a little bit more challenging to to to get working in a huge environment, right? A really massive environment might be a little bit more difficult. So you have to use them strategically. Like right here, I wouldn't want to use a spotlight there because I like all these shadows. So, I really want light coming in uh how many directions? One, two, three, four, five, six directions. Up, down, left, right, forward, back. Okay, does that make sense? Any questions about point lights versus spotlights? What shadow? What do you mean in this case? Yes. This this is this wouldn't work. That's right. I could try like I could say, "Okay, let's do a spotlight

here." You know, I could do that, but you're not going to get those cool shadows. It'll work. Okay, that's the thing. This is the thing about gamedev is like a lot of people who are playing a game, they're not going to fully understand why this is not very visually exciting. They're not going to get it. They won't in their brain they won't go this doesn't work because of X Y and Z. But suddenly in their brain, in their subconscious, this is why I think people's subconscious is smarter than their brain sometimes. Their brain loves this. That's delicious, but they don't know why. That make sense? All right. How we doing? [laughter] Legal says, "Thank you for the lighting

direction or clarification. I've been using spot and point lights wrong." Well, there's also a strategy with spo with with spotlights that I haven't discussed, which is sometimes you really do want uh you want a spotlight or a point light to do something like this. Sometimes you really do want it to sort of cast up a wall. You know, you can imagine um I'll show you and it actually would work practically here. Um if I do if I do one like straight up like this, it makes sense to do that. Just remember, we don't want to blow out the lights. Okay, so let's do this. And something you got to be careful with with point lights is don't make it so tall. So, there's no reason to try and cast information up there. Just do that. Okay. It's still a little hot. It's still a little hot, so be gentle. There we go.

So, you can do something like that, but the problem is it just doesn't look right because it there's no what we would call scattering. Um, there's no scattering. And so, you'd have to sort of mimic scattering either with this or you could use like GI or something, global illumination. So that's that's kind of how we could do it here. But you might even want to do um just broaden it like that. There we go. Something like that. So if we hit play, you could see why we might want to do this. We're mimicking GI with this and bringing it down a little bit. So here we go. Let's take a look. Is there a limit to how many scenes you can have lights you can have in a scene? If you're asking that question, if [snorts] you're asking that question, you officially need to use some kind of light oluding script. In my opinion, you officially want to use a light occlusion script. Now, I have my own. I think Chad GBT wrote it or I got this

one from the asset store. I have a light occludder and what it does is it collects all the real-time lights when we start the in play mode. It collects them all and puts them in a big fat list and then it basically fades them all in and out and then turns them off entirely based on the distance from the player. That's a great way to reduce um to reduce um I'm going to reduce that uh it's a little too bright. Uh the amount of lights in a scene. So you could place like a thousand lights in a scene, but only 10 are rendering because of this occlusion script. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Okay, so you might be thinking, "Wow, that was a ton of work, Thomas." Oh, Thomas, I don't like that. Well, now we have this one light. Now, I know these aren't really in back rooms, these lights. Um, but it's good to at least Let's not make it blue, by the way.

Let's do a little bit of a warm green. But we can make this a prefab. And then we can just place this all over the place. Make it a prefab here. And then I can just go, "Yay!" Whoops. Hold on one sec here. For some reason, that didn't work. Prefab variant. There we go. And I'm just going to place them all over the place like this. See? So, we just use them all over. Um, they're not my favorite. I don't really care about them. They're kind of ugly, but I'm trying to make a point here of why we want to use these um or or make a point about point lights versus spotlights in a game. This is I'm going to be honest with you guys. My next game, the scenes are going to be significantly smaller than what they are in Twisted Tower. Twisted Tower scenes, we're actually cutting them into pieces now um because they're just so big. We treated them like Doom maps, which was a huge mistake. Um,

okay. So, we have our lights sort of being cast up the walls. They don't look like back rooms lights, but the point is is to show you spotlights and point lights. Any questions? Any questions? Thomas, I'm 31. I've been working on my game for three years now. All this talk about small games is giving me second thoughts. You and me too, buddy. Um, I'm not quitting though. I don't I don't want to at this point. Well, Twisted Tower is actually a great game and I think it's going to do well. I I do. But, um, my next game I think is going to be I'll be honest with you guys. I'm thinking about doing um one hour little horror. They're almost like horshore films. Hort shore short horror films

that are like $2 and just releasing those every month. Um, and doing it's kind of like puppet combo. I think I'm going to do that for for like a year and just see if it's a profitable um a profitable idea. So, um Okay. You say this tuck back. Shut your mouth. You say this every time. Um, yeah. I would say with this one, it probably is a little weird. And I think one of the solutions would be something like this. Creating some kind of wide. Let me see here. Um, widening it maybe. Yeah. And changing the rotation a little bit. So, it's kind of coming out from the top like that. But I mean it doesn't even make sense practically because that's not the shape of the light. But just trying to make a point about these lights. Okay, chill.

Okay, so that's point lights versus spotlights. Now, one of the things that I've noticed about set dressing, and we'll move on to the to the sound effects, but [gasps] a little precursor to set dressing, I've actually found less is more with set dressing. Um, the back rooms is a great example of this. This scene looks really good, but I could clutter this scene up with set dressing and all of a sudden it would look cheap. So, I want to talk to you about set dressing in a second. We're going to talk about set dressing and being strategic about where we place items. The worst thing you can do is set dress randomly. Just place stuff. Instead, we need to be thinking like again like a director. Okay. All right. Would it be profitable posting video shorts on YouTube relying on the ads? No.

Not in my opinion. YouTube the money is not made from ads. I will tell you. Where do you guys think the money is made? Does anyone know? Do you see that giant banner at the bottom of my stream? I'm very open about this, by the way. I'm not ashamed of it at all. I think it's great that I that I'm able to sell courses and help you guys. And good grief, this back rooms file is going to like blow up my computer. Um, but we'll move on to the next thing while we wait for this thing to load. Um, good grief, I'm getting some weird I smell coffee. My wife is making coffee right now. All right, let's talk about shadows. Okay, we talked about shadows a little bit yesterday, but I want to talk about in particular um one key element of shadows. Okay, I'm

going to bring in a couch. Okay, now I want this game to feel more like um HalfLife. So, I'm not going to use my Bioshocky looking couches. Instead, I'm going to use this very simple couch here. And we're going to also use this couch to discuss uh assets um from the asset store and also asset flipping. Okay? But for now, we're going to use this couch to talk about lighting. Okay? Or I'm sorry, shadows. So, I'm play mode here. And I don't know where we got this couch from, but whatever. Um, Thomas, why did you say backrooms is easy to make? Because backrooms, I'm not saying it's easy to make it good. I'm just saying if you wanted to make a back rooms game, it would be easy to do. Um, because it's it relies heavily on liinal space, which liinal space, the whole point of liinal space is emptiness.

Um, so first off, when it comes to Let me close this out really quick. My computer's freezing on me. Um, yeah, there it goes. Completely frozen, guys. Are we still live? Yeah, we're still live. Now, it's not necessarily selling courses that makes you money. It's having your own product. when you have your own product on YouTube, whether it's a game, uh whether it's an early access game or a pre-order or doing a Kickstarter campaign, uh selling courses, uh selling consulting, coaching, people want to people want to learn from other people. They love people. Courses are one thing like or AI is one thing, but when you have an actual person teaching you something, it's just so much more rewarding. Um so people love that. Uh, when it comes to the scale of this chair, you'll notice

that um, it was super big. So, I'm going to scale it down a little bit. I think it opened up here. Let's double check. Woo! My computer's about to blow up. There it goes again. I'm going to save this scene before it crashes. Um, it's this freaking Audacity. Yeah, it's taking forever to load. Sorry, guys. I shouldn't have downloaded that 10-hour one. Okay, let's talk about shadows. Okay, [snorts] you'll notice that this couch when I brought it into the scene, you'll notice that cast shadows is off. That's not the default in Unity. In fact, I have a script right here. I can't dismble mesh renderer shadows. It goes through my entire project and kills all the shadows from every single prefab. It turns off cast shadows. That's the default for my projects. The reason why is because not everything

needs to cast a shadow. If you do that, your game will um be very slow, especially if you have really big scenes. Instead, what I like to do with shadows is I like to be very picky about number one, which shadows are uh which lights cast shadows and number two, which objects cast shadows. It's a dance and you got to be very picky. Okay? So, for example, this light here, I turned on the shadows. Remember this? This light down here, I turned on the shadows. Okay? If I were to say, well, I need something to fill down here like that. Maybe you need something to fill in this little this hole back here all the way down there to create some sort of creepy vibe. Let's say we want that. Maybe there's a light down there. Okay, this doesn't need to cast shadows. There's no reason why this should cast shadows. Like, look what happened. Look,

I turn the shadows are on. Is anything happening? No. So, turn that sucker off. Nothing happened. Nothing's different. Yet, it's still going to try and render shadows. So, we want to make sure we turn that off. Okay. Also, we don't want it that hot. Very subtle. There we go. All right. So, I'm going to keep that there just as an example of a shadow. A light that doesn't need a shadow. This one. Does it need a shadow? Well, let's see what see what happens when we turn it off. Oh, wow. Wow, it feels kind of like a 90s game all of a sudden. But the moment you turn on shadows. Oh, it kind of looks good. I like it way up high like that. Just scale up that. There we go. It's just too hot up there. That, by the way, if anyone's curious, Unity's light attenuation fall-off sucks. Okay, I don't know how to describe it, but Unity's light is like this. It's

like a triangle at the right here at the uh center of the light. super hot and sharp and then it falls off terribly. It's really strange. It's not very pretty. So, you have to kind of play with it. Um whereas, you know what you call it? Um Unreal is awesome. Has great falloff. Okay. Uh yeah, this is live. We're live right now. Um Okay, let me brighten this up a little bit though. But I do like those shadows. I really do. I just I wish it wasn't so hot right there. I wish you could adjust the heat of the light at the center, but of course you can't because it's unity. It's trash. But so we're going to have to bring it down a little bit so it's not so hot. But I do like those shadows. I really do. Um, okay. I think we're good. Uh oh. to to wrap up our conversation about real-time shadows. This would be a great opportunity

to turn on a shadow. Okay, but you'll notice there's not a lot of drama here. You know, it looks good, but there's not a lot of drama. So, when you're creating a story game or a horror game, it's best to try and think of ways to create drama. Drama. Oh, drama is something like this where you position various elements to create long shadows. So, you can imagine maybe a couch is sort of sitting right here, right? And you could go, okay, well, let's move this down to create length. Do you see? Being very specific about where your lights are, which lights cast shadows, which ones don't. I think that's going to be a really small couch. Let's let's shift gears and go backwards in time now that Unity's opened up this

10hour file. And I'm going to just create a 30 second file from it. Woo. We're going to set it to time. There we go. So that's like 15 minutes right there. There we go. I think. No, no, no. That's that's 15 seconds. Okay. So, we want to make sure it loops properly. So you you could see the mistake that I was about to make here. That's the start of the sound file. We we just want to cut it here. Let's turn up. Make sure it's going through the right setup here. Playback device. And by the way, if you're just joining us and you want to learn how to start a game studio from your bedroom, click the link below to check it out. See if it's something you're interested in. I've got a massive program for Black Friday, 50% off. You're going to learn everything I've learned in the last decade of making indie games. And that includes pitching to publishers. That includes 2D art, 3D art. That includes Unity, C marketing, how to get wish lists, how to hit the Steamfront page, how to get Kickstarter campaigns funded.

I've done all of this stuff. And I just decided, hey, I'm going to put it in one giant premium course. There's a private Discord server. There's 4,500 students worldwide. And hey, I'll also give you a shout out in tomorrow's or I'm sorry, Monday's live stream just as a thank you. Uh, this sale event doesn't happen but once a year. This is true. Um, so please please check it out if you're even interested. Um, just click the link below and look at it. Um, there's a 30-day money back guarantee. No questions asked. I'm not going to hassle you or haggle you or whatever the word is. In fact, you're not even going to email me. You're going to email my assistant. I told him not to ask questions. Just give a refund. Um, okay. So, let's listen to this here. Now, you're going to think this is odd, but I'm going to actually set that the volume between -12 and -6. And the reason why is because I want all of my sounds, no matter what they are, even if it's a kitty cat meowing or a loud scream, I want it between -12 and -6. -10 is a

good rule of thumb. So that every sound I import into Unity has a constant volume value. That gives me a lot of control. when I import all my sounds and then I can adjust the volumes. Otherwise, you get super confused. Everything has a strange volume. Um, so you want everything to have a static volume when you export it and then you can adjust the volumes inside of Unity. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Okay, here we go. I'm going to pump it up, guys. Sorry, it's going to be really loud. That looks about right. Pump it down a little bit. Now, the question is, does it loop well? Well, the way they can check is, and by the way, this is Audacity. This is a free audio software. Super easy to learn, super easy to use. Let's double check the loop.

I didn't even hear it. H I did hear a little click. I heard a little click. Why did we hear that? I think that's because of Audacity. So, we're good. I'm gonna export that as um it's not 10 hours of back rooms. We're just going to call it back rooms ambience. Okay. Very good. Let's go to Unity here and we're going to go to ambience. Oh, no. It's actually a different file. It's this one right here. There it is. Audio source. I'm going to delete that one because that's our music. There's no music in back rooms, is there? And we're going to type in ambience. And it should be in our file automatically. Back uh it should be in in the file automatically in the folder automatically. It's not for some reason. Um I don't know why that's the case.

must have missed the import. And I'm being really messy because I'm not really thinking about the project. There it is. Because I'm going to discard all of this stuff, but this is just for us to learn. Okay. [laughter] Tuck back says, "I finally caved and downloaded Audacity. Wished I would have done it sooner." Yeah, it's because it's amazing. All right. Here we go. Let's Let's listen. Okay. So now now that we have by the way the pitch is set to point eight. We're going to set it to point put to one. One is the default. It was just 08 because of yesterday. I'm going to set the volume to like 0.1. And you could even go 0.08. Very subtle. You don't want it too loud. Yeah. Maybe even less.

And you might be wondering, where's the carpet sound, Tommy? Well, I actually have something called, and I want to tell you about this. I have something called a sound manager. This is not a prefab. This is a scriptable object. And a scriptable object is basically a game object that just lives in the project hierarchy. It doesn't really live uh in the um in the scene, but it can be referenced by game objects in the scene. And all it really does is it's just it's a container of information and variables. And so if I go to my uh I have a something called ground terrain sound groupings. I can go to carpet and I can show you the script here if you want to see it. And I actually wrote this before AI became a thing. And I'm really proud of this script. Um, the sad thing is this took me about, you know, 12 hours to write and Copilot could probably write this in 30 seconds now. Um, but I'm going to open that up here.

I'm going to delete that file, by the way, this 10 hours of back rooms file because I feel like my computer's about to blow up. Let me open that up. Give me just a sec, guys. Hey, Jude. All right. Okay. So, yeah, this is the uh the sound manager script. Um, but it uh all it does is it just contains sound groups, a list, ground groups, a list. That's about it. Um, but inside of those, it contains um this doesn't look right. No, this can't be right. Oh, it's cuz these are different classes. Yep. So, I got a sound group class and inside that class, it contains all this cool stuff. Sound and the the audio clips and the strings and stuff. So, anyway, I can add this

texture to this giant list of textures. These textures are cross-cheed when the player raycast. The player controller will raycast down and it'll look at a texture and say, "Okay, is that texture in the sound manager? Is this texture in the sound manager? Yes, it is. What sound do I play? These. So, I can add this to my list here. I'm gonna select the texture here. Right. It's called carpet. And I'm going to keep this inspector locked here. Right there. And then I'm going to open up a new inspector. Okay. And that's so that I could select the carpet and then drag it into the scriptable object. Um, so I'm going to go to my sound manager here. And now I can just go ahead and add this texture here. Um, which is Oh crap. I'm going to unlock that.

Wait, what? No, that was the right call. Crap. Sorry. There it is. There's the texture. I can drag it here. Come on. Go down, Unity. There we go. Drag it in here. And so now we get that subtle grandma carpet footstep sound. Here we go. I'm going to close this. I've got a headache. I've got a headache. Let's hit play. Do you hear it now? Okay. So far so good, guys. Um, is it feeling back roomsy?

You know what makes it not feel like backrooms? I will tell you, is the trim, the wood trim. In back rooms, the wood trim is actually the same color. It's like a yellow. Um, so I'm going to make sure that that's the colors change so that that can adjust to be sort of matchy matchy with the walls. There we go. Okay, cool.
Yes, Thomas, it feels back roomy.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, what's next? What are we teaching about? Are we Are we tracking okay with Thomas? Is everybody learning something? I hope so. Um, we talked about lighting, we talked about shadows, we talked about optimization, decals. Decals. Okay. With a game like this where we have every surface is pretty much flat. Um, we can go ahead and start adding

subtle decals. Now, what a decal is is all it is is a transparent quad with a cool texture on it. That's it. So, if I wanted to, I could go to like our carpet texture here, and I'm going to double the size here. Merge all these layers together because we're not actually going to use this carpet texture, but I'm just going to I'm gonna This is the thing about gamedev. You can just jump inside of another file and and then just save it. and uh and just I just sort of duplicate files over and over again honestly. Um but I'm going to create like a a looping texture here just so I have a reference point and and don't underestimate the value of having a reference point while you're designing some art. Now, obviously, guys, we could um we could just go ahead Google like on textures.com like a stain a stain texture or something. Um but what I'm

going to do while I just so I don't waste your time, I'm going to type in carpet stain PNG on Google and I'm just going to grab a carpet stain PNG. Okay, so we don't have any on Google. So, I'm actually going to This is Okay, I'm actually going to go on textures.com. I'm going to use some of my credits because I love you guys. And we're going to go ahead and look at some carpet stains here. Stain decal. Let's see what we got. I know. Hold on. Hold on. I know you can't see my screen. I think um yeah, there we go. I'm going to just grab this one right here. And I'm just going to to to save credits. I'm just going to use three. And that's 1600 by 101. I'm going to open this up in Photoshop. It's a PNG file. Yay. And I just want to see how it looks on the carpet. You'll say, "Okay, well, that doesn't look very good, right?" Um, so what we're going to do here is I'm just going to drop down the

lightness all the way. So, it's kind of like a dirty, ugly brown. There we go. You could get away with a low saturation green if you wanted to. That's it. That's our stain. All I'm going to do is make this stain. We're trim it up. Click trim in Photoshop. So, it's a nice trim. I'm going to save this as carpet stain decal. Now, you're going to want to be much more organized with your files. Please God. But in this case, for me, I'm not going to worry about organization. Okay? Because I'm trying to be quick here. I don't want you guys to get bored. I want the views. Okay, let's move our decal over here. Control shift F brings the decal over here. Do we want it to cast shadows? Anybody? Do we want our decal to cast shadows? This is a pop quiz. Do we want our decals to cast shadows?

answer the question. No. Good. Turn that crap off. And decals. There's one way to do a decal. Position a decal so it's flat. I can hold V and pick one of the vertexes, click and drag, and it'll snap. Okay. The problem with this is what does anyone know what this is called? If I snap this to this corner here, what's this called? What do we call that?

That's Z fighting. Good job. Yay. A pennant. Here's some candy. I'm going to grab this and bring this texture onto the quad. Okay. I'm going to set it to be transparent. And I'm going to just make sure that I bring it up just a little bit. Now, what do you see here? We see a lot of white. It's like what? Well, one of the reasons there's white is because there's smoothness. Default smoothness. That's reflection of the shine of the light. Well, mama, we don't want that. We don't want it to be shiny. Why would we want it to be shiny? So, let's turn it off. But, mama, there's more. The the decal is uh there's white. Well, we need to go into the actual texture file and make sure we turn off make sure alpha or move PSD mat

apply. All that does, this is a this is sort of an age-old issue with transparency. Essentially, when importing transparent objects, Unity doesn't know what the halfway transparent pixels should be. It doesn't quite know. It doesn't know what underneath it should be. It's hard to explain. Just click that button. [laughter] And if you see any fuzzy white stuff, um, that sounds weird, but if you see any fuzzy white stuff in your decal, that's that's why um, we're getting some other fuzzy the the smoothest value we need to turn off. Burp. There we go. So, there's our decal. I'm seeing a little bit of white there, and I'm not sure why. Wait, that wasn't it. No, it was. I'm seeing a little bit of white there, and I don't know why. I think it's because of the decal it the

the actual uh stain itself. We might need to expand the canvas a little bit more. The trouble with decals by Thomas Brush. And you might be thinking, well, why would we why would we need a decal? Decals make an environment look like it's not a game. I mean, that's the best way I can describe it. it it creates variability. Um, so I'm going to call this decal um decal stain. And look, you can use these all over the place with rotation. Okay. And you could scale them up, right? And by the way, do we need a mesh collider on this? Heck no. We don't need a mesh collider. We can just move these all over the place. I will be completely honest with you guys. I don't know why there's a

subtle white. I'm not sure what that is. What I'm going to do is go into Unity or Photoshop and fade it out. Fade out the edges and see if that solves it. It doesn't. I have never seen this issue before actually. I think it's fine, but I I don't know why that's happening. It kind of bothers me. Oh, it's this. I think it's that. Ah, I know what it is. It's this. Preserve specular lighting. Turn that off. There we go. Okay, we figured it out. Thank god. Yay. All right, our quads look good, baby. I'm going to go back to Photoshop and remove those masks. And then uh there we go. So, we got all

these ugly stains and we can just place them all over the place really quick. And I'll show you guys why this is so valuable. Rotate them. And you'll notice that the top view of maps sometimes have the decal sticking out like that. I I know some people don't like that. I mean, I can imagine people don't like that, but um Oh, you'll notice the rotation's wrong. We need to make sure it's set to nice clean values. 90 by90. Yes. Nice clean values, baby. Is that one a nice clean value? It is good. 9090. That's not 90. 46 is rotating along the y- axis. This is going to be90. There we go. And you're probably thinking, "Oh, it looks really it just it's too much, Thomas. It's too much." Well, hang on.

Don't be so greedy and selfish. You want everything because we're all on the same plane here. We've got some sweet decals. Now, let's take a look and let's say, "Okay, well, how's this look? It's a little much, huh? So, let me show you. What you can do is because it's a Photoshop document because it's a Photoshop document, I can go in and reduce the opacity. Let me kill the occlusion data. Uh, occlusion data. By the way, I have occlusion calling data and we'll talk about occlusion calling in a second, but I'm going to clear that. That's why we're getting flickering. Um, I'm going to merge these together here and just reduce the opacity. And that should do.

Okay, I I had this issue yesterday where I was trying to clear occlusion calling data from this scene and it froze and I could not figure out why. Um I don't know why. Okay, we got it. Thank God. Thank you, Lord. Um okay, so this is this is why decals are so valuable. So, instead of this being a giant 4K carpet with various [sighs] stains on it, now it's it feels like a real environment, but it's all just a looping texture with decals. You see, we can increase the uh the saturation just a little bit.

Yeah. All right. Good. Now, we could also, if we wanted to, uh, this is one thing I'm not 100% sure about, but I believe that if you wanted to have a faster decal that was, you know, more efficient, you could go to opaque instead of transparent and just do a heavy alpha clip. It's just not going to look nearly as good. Okay, so that looks kind of tuny, which is not bad. And then we can reduce the opacity of it. Yeah, it's just it's just problematic, you know. It's not going to look great. Yeah, but you can do that if you want. Um, but in my case, I'm just going to do this. That looks awesome. But look, we can use this decal all over the place,

guys. I can I can flip it up like this. Just make sure you're using clean 90 degrees. So, we'll do 180. 90 plus 90 is. And then we're going to put that here. You know, should you do decals before a level is done or after a level is done? Who knows the answer? Should you do decals before a level is done or after a level is done? Who knows? Who knows the answer to that beautiful, wonderful question? Oops. That's right. Do not, I plead with you and I I beg you in the name of well in

the name of the king, do not do decals until you're absolutely sure your level is done. And I'll explain why in a second, but I'm just showing it to you for now. So guys, look how cool this room looks now. It's just this these subtleties that make it feel lived in. I will tell you that um for big, you know, story games and story games and shooter or uh horror games, what you're really aiming for is you're aiming for a sense of immersion. So, decals like this aren't super important in my opinion for like friend sloppy games, although it could help, I guess. But for immersive games, immersive horror games, all it just basically subconsciously brings the player into the world. And we'll talk about triggers and sound triggers and all that stuff in a second and how that can help as well. Um,

but your goal is to try and get the player to forget that they're alive. You want them to think, "Oh my word, I just entered the back rooms." You could see why they're so valuable. Look at that wall versus this. And you can always take it too far, of course. But overall, pretty sweet, huh? Okay, that's decals. That make sense? texture variation. I'll show you one quick thing about texture variation. So, I can take this one texture for let's say our a ceiling panel. Okay, let's do it with our ceiling panel. I can take this ceiling panel here and I

can go, you know what, I want one of them to look like it's been popped out. Is that the Yeah, that's the ceiling panel. Yep. Um, I could do that and then I could sort of maybe make it make it look kind of 3D by doing something like this. We're just sort of mimicking it, especially if the player is far away. We could just mimic a three-dimensional ceiling panel like there's darkness through that ceiling panel, like it's been popped out. So, let's try that. We're just mimicking sort of a three- dimensional look here. I'm going to save this as ceiling tile broken. And then I'm going to do another one, which is all of them. And we're going to see if this looks good. Okay. And I'm going to guess that this ceiling tile here, this one, this is going to be

too big. And I'm going to need to add some adjustments. But this one's ceiling tile all broken. Now, let's go ahead and go back into our back rooms world, and let's go ahead and create a material from um that ceiling tile. So, this is going to be called ceiling tile broken. And then this one's going to be ceiling ceiling tile broken, too. Thomas, I could do this or let's do broken all. Thomas, I could do this with um with decals. You could you could absolutely do this with decals or you can do it with texture. I'm going to do it with texture so that I have clean control on the grid. So I can take this one here. Okay. And let's see. I'm going to take all of these here and I'm going to do Come on. Select you mother effer. Hold on. Let me I'm going to take these stain decals here. I'm going to lock them all or lock the

ability to touch them because it's causing some problems. I'm trying to select them. This is the big problem with ProBuilder is selecting faces can be a real pain in the butt. Okay, remember the broken one? I'm going to drag that there. But you notice that nothing happened and that's because I didn't add the new texture. Okay, there it is. So, we have one ceiling tile broken there. It looks fine. And then we're going to do this one with the the the the all one. Okay. Not there. We're going to do it right here. There we go. So, that one's all but nothing's nothing's changing. And that's because we haven't brought in our new texture. There it is. Good. Okay. So, it looks bad. Let me show you what what we need to do. You can even get away with just doing a fade. Okay. So, you can do this. And all it all it looks like is it's like, okay, well, maybe uh maybe it's

the panel sort of pushed in. And the way to make it look pushed in is this. Give me just a sec here. Go. I don't know why it looks so bad. Hang on one sec. Okay, I will show you in a sec here. So, that looks like the panel's a little bit pushed in. Um, this one I'm okay with. Uh, I'm okay with um Oh, this one I'm going to fix. I promise. This one I'm actually okay with how dark it is. What we can do with this one is just extrude it up. You see? That's why I like everything on a grid. Um, you could just create all sorts of cool extrusions. That's a little thick. So, we're just going to do that. This is stuff you want to do after

the fact. This one I could extrude if I wanted to, like this, just to create subtle details, subtle changes. I think it's fine. Um, it's not my favorite. Another option is this. I'll show you. Another option is to do something like this. But I really want the texture to look good. So what I want to do is uh take this here. I'm going to extrude sec guys. One sec. Yeah, I'm fine with that. Do that. And then what you can do is you could take these and collapse them. and collapse this and collapse that. But then you're going to have to go in and fix all of the UVs.

Um, but that's fine for now. I mean, it's something. But if we wanted to, I could clean up that texture more. So, for example, something that could be really cool is to actually take the I don't know why I love this stuff, but I could take this uh right here and I could scale it up so it's like a single piece and it looks like it's been it's been sort of placed in there, you know. Um I could uh let me go and sharpen it a little bit. Looks a little blurry. There we go. And then I could take this and maybe do like um some sort of weird I don't know almost like it's a a vent or something. I'm just trying to create some texture on that ceiling.

I'll show you what I mean. A little bit of a bevel here. I will show you what I mean in just a sec, guys. I'm going to get the color right, too. I don't know what it is, you know? I'm just sort of playing with it to see to see what it's going to do. Yeah, something like that. And then we'll colorize it. And I'm going to add a little bit of texture to it as well, so it sort of matches. Drop it down. Save it. and see what it looks like. Yeah, I don't really care. I mean, we could probably get away with this. Let me show you something like this. I could drop make this super dark. Make it look like a hole. Increase this here. We're going to figure it out. I promise.

something like this could work. Yeah. So, it's like broken. That could work, too. All right. And then just a subtle highlight here. [whistles] Just like that. Let's see here. Where is this? Yep, I

got it. There we go. Got a subtle highlight or something. Just like it's broken. That's not my best work, but you get the idea, right? You know what? We could probably get rid of this rim now because it kind of looks like it's a broken piece. Yeah. And then I can take this and bring it down like that. Yeah, that'll work actually. Look, this might actually work, guys. I love that knocking.

And I think um what we'd want to do is just make it so that there's almost like light faintly filling in this darkness. Let's grab all of this here. There we go. I'm gonna blur it a little bit, too. There we go. Yeah, I love that knocking. It's so creepy. Okay. And then the idea is to be able to do something without actually um I really want to figure this out. This one I'm really interested in. Um

the idea is to get get something working without requiring any mesh changes. This would probably look good in corners. In fact, I know that's true. Let me let me let me do something. And by the way, let's make it brown. This needs to be like a brown color. Come on. Why isn't that working? What's going on? What? Okay, but now I'm getting frustrated. There it goes. Okay. So, it is working. I wonder if it's because there's a shine to it. Couldn't tell you. I wonder why that's so dark. It's not dark once you get close to it. But, uh, it'll look good really, really good in

corners, though. So, for example, if I went over here and I did the tile broken large. There it is. Let's set that to Here we go. You could rotate it so that it's nice and clean. I don't know why this one got screwed up. It's a mystery to me. It was going so well.

There we go. Just do it like this. Yes. There we go, Tommy. You figured it out, buddy. You figured it out, dude. Yes, I did. We almost panicked there. We're okay. Yeah, in corners it'll look really good. Really, really good. There we go. This one we're going to just set it back to what this is here. And so that's texture variation, right? Um I will admit I don't love this one. Let's just go to ceiling tile. There it is. Set material. There we go. Um yeah, there we go. And then this one here, we'll just bring back. And we'll need to collapse those vertices because there's like 16 vertices right there.

But yeah, hopefully you get the idea. of how you use texture um of how you use texture to create some variation in your scene. Honestly, what I'm going to do here, I want to show you something. This is driving me crazy. I'm sorry, guys. What I want to do here, [laughter] it's driving me crazy. I want to go to this here and put this on top of this. I don't know why um that darkness looks so bad. But what I want to do is make it look like there's something underneath it. That's really all I want to do. Just make it look like something's underneath it. Let me save that. See how that looks. Okay, that doesn't work. It's weirdly It's uh I wonder if you need to turn off the No, I don't know why that's happening. Why is that so dark? Try this here. Okay, that's better. There we go. Okay. Yay. All right, guys. I I I my

create my credibility has been officially maintained. Um, and then we're just going to add a little bit of a shadow there so it looks elevated. There we go. Now, I don't know exactly what this means. Don't ask me, but it looks fine from a distance. Yep. Yep, it does. Okay, good. That's all I really care about. It's just a piece that's broken. Look at that. Does Thomas win? I think he does. And we can grab this here as well and do it over there. We're learning on the job, folks. One more. Just because I I really care about proving my point here. I can actually just rotate this um the UV. We should be good.

[whistles] There we go, Tommy. All right, guys. And then um we got to clean that up. I don't know what happened here, but we're just going to fix that really quick. Grab our wallpaper. Okay, let's uh enter play mode and take a look at our decals and also our te texture variations. Now, you can imagine, look at that. We could also use texture variation for the carpet. All right, so let's go ahead and jump into that. Or actually, let me let me let me explain something here. We could do texture variation to create subtle differences in the actual wallpaper itself. Okay, so for or like this is a

great option to do some cool textures here. So like on this on this panel down here. So let's [snorts] go to Oh, and I want to show you something. There's so many things I want to do. Halflife does this so well. Halflife has uh texture that is meant to be looped along the horizontal but not vertically. And I'll let me explain what I mean. If we go to uh let's say textures.com, I'm going to type in um wallpaper. Okay. And we'll make this like match uh with uh with with back rooms. This one's fine, I guess. I'm going to grab this one. I'm going to download this and I'm going to open up in Photoshop. And I want it to be the same exact size as the other wallpaper. Okay. Um, I want it to be the exact same size

as the other wallpaper. By the way, if you're just joining us, just remember you can join fulltime gamedev below. Thomas, you've been talking a lot about this course sale. What's going on, dude? Well, it's Black Friday and every year I do a big huge promotion. This is the biggest one I have done all year and it only happens once a year. Okay, I'm going to do a square though like this. It's not It's not um Hold on, let me let me finish this ad read. 50% off for fulltime ge for Black Friday. If you want to learn everything I've learned in the last decade of making indie games, I'm on my third commercial release currently published by 3D Realms. If you want to learn how to pitch to publishers, how to get funded on Kickstarter, how to hit the Steamfront page, how to get wish lists, how to do devlogs on YouTube, how to do 2D art, how to do 3D art, how to code in Unity, how to do Unity GDAU or Unreal, how to reach out to the press and get press coverage, how to stream, get

streamers to play your game. I'm going to teach you how to do it. Oh, these teachers, all these YouTubers, they just teach what they don't know and they pretend like they're smart. They do. A lot of them do. I've actually done all this stuff. I'm in the trenches with you guys. Okay? If you don't believe me, just look up my Kickstarter campaigns. Look up my games on Steam. They have very positive scores. Even my my demo for Twisted Tower, which I'm currently working on now, that has very positive over a thousand reviews. I do have credibility and I want to teach you guys what I what I've learned. Um, so check out that link below and if you're a student, let me know in the chat what you think about the program. Okay. I don't like that wallpaper. It's trash. I'm going to go to I'm going to type in back rooms wallpaper here. Oh, we have some more. Yay. Okay, look at this. This one's great. I want to show you guys the look at that. Okay, by the way, a lot of you

don't really know in your heads. You're probably unsure why does that look so good? It's what I was talking about with HalfLife. Halflife has horizontal looping only textures. So, let me and this is a great example. This doesn't this does. Let me show it's going to blow your mind. I've never even done this. [laughter] We don't do this in Twisted Tower. I I saw it in HalfLife and I thought that looks so good and there's a reason why. So, I want to show it to you. Um, I'm going to take this and do that. And I'm actually going to double the width of this. You know what? I'm going to double the the I'm going to do 200 by 200. I want to show you what I mean. Actually, no. I'm gonna I'm so excited about this. If

you can't tell, guys, I love making games so much. I love it so much. It's It's just so much fun. I just love doing this. But I'm going to I'm going to actually double the width as well. Now, obviously, what I'm about to show you, you can do with decals. You absolutely can, and that's totally fine. But We're not going to do it with decals. We're going to do it with a nice clean unwrap or a nice clean single texture. I'm going to go to textures.com and I'm going to type in decal uh grime. Decal wall dirt. There we go. Something like this. decal wall. There we go. I want it to be that muddy uh

grunge. Okay, that's what we want. Yay, I found it. I'm going to download this. I'm g show you guys what I mean here. I don't know why, but we never did this in Twisted Tower, and it really busts my balls. I wish we did. I really do. But this is what I mean. This is what I mean by uh horizontal. The per the purpose is a horizontal tiling but not a vertical tiling. You see? And I'm going to set it to overlay so it blends a little bit better. And I'm I'm going to even do a little bit of like subtle who knows ambient occlusion. And it's not going to loop perfectly. And I actually I want to show you why it's not going to loop perfectly, but I'm going to go wallpaper striped yellow grunge top. I don't know. Um, yep. So, I'm going to grab this. Go to

ProBuilder and I'm going to grab all of these. Okay. It might help to do a little bit something like this. Let's see here. If I press F, there we go. I'm going to grab as long as I don't have select hidden on this should work just fine. Yeah, there it goes. But that's the problem with ProBuilder. It's like face ring. Yep. Even still, we're gonna have to do it manually, guys. And that's okay. That's okay. I'm gonna do it with this wall first just to show you guys so you don't get impatient. And I know a lot of you are selfish and impatient. Um, so I just want to cater to you. Wallpaper striped yellow. We're going to call this grunge top. And I'm going to grab that grunge top texture and stick it here. And then I'm going to put that here. Yeah, right there. Um,

there we go. And you can see here it's kind of ugly, right? So, what we need to do is we need to make sure let's go to select by material here. There we go. And I'm going to go to my UV editor and I'm going to set it to uh let's see here. 16 is good, but we're going to need to position it. Okay. So, we're going to position here. Now, 16 is not um 16 is not um uh big enough. So, it could be that we need to scale the texture down. The texture might be just too big. I think that's probably Yeah, it's a pretty big texture. Uh, I we could probably bring it down um by I feel like we could get away with 50%. I'm going to try it. See what happens. Why didn't that do anything? It should. [laughter] I don't know why that didn't do anything. Oh, but it's okay. Um, let's

see. point uh 0.1 by 0.1. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. Now, one thing I don't like about ProBuilder, I probably need to go into the settings, is that yellow color when you select something. It's so ugly. Um but uh yeah, 0.1 is a little much. So, we're going to do point uh five. That should do it. Yeah. Yep. That's good. Okay. Let's do it with every single wall in here. Okay, guys. We'll stop it there. We'll stop it. Uh we'll start one there. And then we're going to drag that in. Same one here. Okay. But we want to make sure I'm going to select by material. I'm going to make sure that all of these are are nice and uh all the same.

Okay. So, again, I'm going to go to point. What was it? 0.05. Was that what it was? I can't remember. It was 0.125. I think we're going to convert to We're going to go to planer here. Yeah. Convert back to auto. Go to 16. No. Dang it. It's losing its unwrap. I think we're okay. Yeah. Yeah. We're almost there, guys. Okay. There we go. All right. So, now what I'm going to do is make sure we're getting a nice clean uh putting the grunge at the top there. There we go. You're noticing that it's not looping perfectly, right? And that we on the on

the horizontal. So, I'm going to show you that in a sec here. But having it positioned so that the grunge is at the top there coming down is what makes this look so good. That looks bad. Watch this. This looks good. Okay. All right. So, hang tight. Let's open up photo Photoshop. And I want to show you something. If we wanted to loop perfectly, we could merge all the layers together. And if I duplicate it and then flip it horizontally and then fade it out. Look, now we'll get a perfectly clean loop. Right now, it's a little bit squashed. Right. So, we're going to go to select by material. Just like that. And we're just going to scale it so that we're not getting that weird squashing. There we go. I'm going to move it up.

That looks good. That's weird. I couldn't tell you actually why that happened. Welcome to ProBuilder, baby. And also, welcome to Thomas in the middle of a live stream. That's just what happens, I guess. Usually, it should fix itself by when I set it to planer. You know, that's usually what happens is when it fixes itself, but it's just we're in the middle of a live stream. Of course, that happened. Um, let's scale it up manually like this here. Why can't you scale? There we go. I don't know why. Look at that. That's crazy. What happened? That's life. That's what all the people say. But hopefully you guys get the picture here. I don't know what happened. It's so weird. I'm gonna I'm gonna just What I like to

do is when I'm like completely floundering, I like to clean up everything else so that it's not in the back of my mind and then I can go to this one and go, "Okay, so what the f happened? What are we talking about here?" Look, there's no there's there's no uh um for some reason there's no trim there, but uh it's whatever. We will fix that. We will fix it. This one I can't quite figure out, man. I don't know what happened here. It's almost like we need to. Okay, it's whatever, guys. It's whatever.

I want it to look perfect. I want it to look perfect. So, we're going to make it look perfect. Here we go. We're gonna make this look perfect. My brain has to see it perfect or I'll go crazy. Hold on one sec, guys. I'm going to grab all of these and I'm going to go back to convert to manual. I'm going to set it to planer. Okay. Convert to auto offset zero 16. Okay, this is nice and clean. That's not bad. This one looks great. That one looks good. That one looks good. This something happened here and my brain hurts.

Okay, this is how I'm going to fix it. Watch. There we go. That's how we're going to fix this. Okay, mama. And then now we can scale them up. I'll be so happy if this works. If some of you are thinking, "Wow, this would never happen to me in gamedev." It's like, well, good for you. But that's not my experience ever. My experience always, always is this stuff always happens. It always does. And it's like, what? And I'm sure obviously there's a solution here. I just don't know what it is. I don't know what happened. But uh yeah, cool.

Hey, that's not This isn't perfect over here, but we don't have time to make it perfect. But let's enter play mode here. All right. So, that looks right. This is wrong. That is right. Yeah. Okay, we're going to fix that. These are too small. Yeah, those are too small. Select by material. Select it like this here. And we're going to make these bigger. And we'll move on to the next topic here. I promise. There we go. All right. I love that little piece there. That looks great. It really does. Um, okay.

So, we've got uh Does that Does that make sense, guys? We've got the use of horizontal tiling textures only. And the goal of those is to have that subtle dirt at the top there. This is my my kind of game, by the way. I love games that have this clean, boxy look. I gotta fix that over here. That's good. That one's screwed up. What about over here? Yeah. So, that one's not showing the texture at the top there for some reason. And I'm going to go crazy. I gotta see it. I got to see it to completion. There's the grunge. Okay. Okay. The grunge. We found it. Okay. Okay. We're almost there, guys. I

promise. I just got to scale it just a little bit and then we're good. Oh, there it is, baby. And then this right here. I don't know what happened. It's so frustrating. We're going to go back to uh auto and we're go to planer convert 48 scale up. Crap. I will tell you that um ProBuilder is kind of frustrating. I'm sure there's something I'm doing wrong here, but uh it's fine. There we go, guys. I think it's fixed. Oh, so close. So close. All right. There we go.

Look, it did it again. [laughter] Oh, that's so frustrating. That's so frustrating. Let's rotate it. I could tell you actually it was probably something we did yesterday in a rush because we're streaming. But uh overall, man, hey, this is awesome. What's the next thing on our list? Oh, guys, doesn't that look great? Super eerie. Thomas, that was really unprofessional how you did that. Well, it looks pretty good, though. I mean, come on. I love the way this looks.
[snorts]
Um, okay. What else is on our list to teach today? Decals, texture, variation, lighting, animation. All right. You asked for it. I'll give it to you. We're going to do lighting, animation. Guys, every little thing, every little detail is so important. Okay, so we have this light decal here, but we also have this light here, right?

Let me close ProBuilder. I'm going to save the scene. We have this light decal and we have this. I'm going to group these together together. Okay. And so now we have this light. Okay. And I actually don't want that decal to cast a shadow because that's just a waste. Turn that off. Okay. I have this one light here. Now I can make a prefab out of this if I wanted to. I'm going to call it flickering light. Um the light decal is flickering, but I also want this point light to flicker as well. Okay. So, I can just go ahead and just add this to my animation. You can write a script for lights flickering, which is totally fine. Um, my current scripts are kind of trash for flickering lights. So, I'm just going to animate it really quick. Flickering light animation. And this helps you show kind of how a light can be flickered. And also, I want to talk about why we how we can olude out animations so they don't play all the time. We don't want that. So, I'm just going to do subtle

flickering. Why the reason I like to animate light flickers these days is because flickering lights with random scripts can get really it can get really headacheinducing really fast. So I like to sort of have complete control over our lights flickering. This one I can do a little bit slow. No. Yeah, I like it. That this slow one is much better. It's easier on the eyes, baby. Yeah, that's great. I'm going to copy that and just let it sit for like five seconds. Yes, that's great. That's all we need. Okay.

Um and then we're going to go to um the animation itself and we're going to say call completely. And if I bake the occlusion data, it'll call out those animations. Pretty straightforward. That way they're not always flickering all the time. How is this no experience when you are a seasoned dev? So this video is for people with no experience who want a broad overview of how a 3D level is designed. So that's what it's it's for people who have no experience. Let's see if it flickers. There it goes. subtle details, guys. Isn't that cool? Now, I want to talk to you guys about one more thing here. Um, or a couple things here. Sound triggers. Okay, so I have sound triggers already

written into my game. Um, sound trigger. There it is. And all they are is little box colliders that I place strategically throughout a scene and they will play a sound effect. Now, you would think that this is something that's kind of an afterthought. It's like, what's the big deal? Why do we need this? But in fact, these are crucial to making a game feel alive. The world should react. This is something that Valve has taught me in terms of just playing their games and watching their documentaries. Every like 15 seconds, something happens. And the world reacts to the player so frequently. It's amazing. It's like a honestly you kind of have to treat it like it's a haunted house where every step there's something new and unique happening. So I can have this soundtrack play when I walk through it. I'm not going to go into the details of the scripts. Um but all the script really does is it

says, "Hey, play this sound when I touch the trigger." That's about it. Um, it's I mean it's a little bit more complicated than that because it saves and stuff but and so it doesn't play all the time and um so yeah I could play like a giggle sound. I think I have some giggle sounds. Jump scare giggle. Uh I think that might work maybe. Let's try that. Um let's try that and see what happens. Right. So, you can play sounds now. That That's kind of silly. So, instead, what I'm going to do is footsteps. I think I have some footsteps. One. Come on. Okay, we can have a scream. A screen play. A distant scream. How's that?

Let's try that. I just don't want to have to find a new sound for you guys. This is just to show to to tell you why it's so important to have sound triggers. [screaming] Hear that? And by the way, this is what it currently looks like with the decals, with the texture rework, with the lighting adjustments. Doesn't this I mean it it's obviously not as good, but it has the that kind of fidelity of I'm about to put myself out there here and and on a limb, go out on a limb here and say it kind of has that Portal HalfLife one and two vibe. It's got that level of uh texture work, especially for a blockout, right? Whereas this, if you go down here, you can see why it's so important to use decals. This is like, oh, but if you go over

here, it's like, oh, that's why we use decals and that's why we use horizontal looping textures. Okay. All right. Um, let's see here. Let's see here what else we got here. [clears throat] Yep. Adam and I are going to have to reschedule. Unfortunately, it's been one of those weeks. One of those weeks. Yeah. Yeah, I had a meeting with Adam Ununice, but it's just been insane this week. Um, maybe I could do that on Tuesday. [sighs] Let's see here.

Okay, here we go. I don't know. I I I think my meeting with Adam was next week. I thought it was next week. Yeah, it's next week. Who said that I have a meeting with Adam? Let me double check. I might have a podcast with him. Well, there he is. There he is. He's like probably really pissed and that's my fault. I'm so sorry, man. I was in the middle of a stream and my phone I'm blaming my phone and my phone. It really didn't didn't throw me the calendar event. And it didn't, by the way. Um, maybe we can do uh Monday. That's going to be a good podcast though. I love Adam when he comes on. And I feel I feel really bad actually. Um, Adam jumped in the chat. [laughter]

Oh man. Yeah, I wanted to get these workshop. This is what's so funny is I delayed these workshops last week. Um, let's see here. So, the next thing we want to jump into is um, let's see here. Set dressing. Okay, so let's talk about set dressing. A lot of people when they when they're thinking about set dressing, especially a horror environment, what they're thinking is, I'm going to put a bunch of chairs in this room. I could put one here, you know, I'll put one there, and then I'll put one over here, right? I'll put one over here, and then put one over here. And the more you add to a scene that

feels liinal, the less scary it becomes. I found this is really true. I really have. Um, instead being very strategic about where you place things um, and being simple and clean is actually much scarier. So, let me show you an example here. I can take one couch. This is especially true with back rooms games. If I put it directly in the center as if it was intentionally placed just for me, placed just for me. And we'll talk about color in a second. But if I do something like this with a light, maybe I can find a lamp

on a table, you know. So, let's find a side table and then we'll put the lamp on there. So, these are from Twisted Tower, so they're not perfect, but actually that that's great. Uh, this right here could actually work just fine. Okay, so we can use lighting to our advantage and not dress the scene too much. Okay, so let's make sure these are big enough first and then we'll talk about lighting. Yeah, and a burning cigarette and an astray. That's right. Okay, so this is this is kind of the idea, but we're going to use lighting to our advantage. Okay, that couch is tiny, by the way. And also, we're going to rework. We're going to do a little bit of asset flipping as well. We're going to do 2.1 by 2.1 by 2.1.

This one, same thing. We'll go to 1.5 one point 1.5 1.5. Um, okay. So, let me show you kind of what I mean by using symmetry, simplicity, centrality, and lighting to our advantage. I'm going to move this chair. Let's imagine the chair being like right here. And we walk through this hall and we see this creepy chair. Okay. I could take this light source here and turn on the shadows and make it cast a spooky light and we're going to we're going to use what we learned about lighting and shadows in just a sec here. Like just like that. Drop this down. This guy I'm going to move over a little bit closer. Flickering light here. Yep. Just like this.

and drop the range down so that I can have it right there. And then we're going to have one light here. It's going to be pretty broad, but we're going to have a nice big shadow being cast. And this is what I was talking about earlier where we're not going to light practically. We're going to light for the moment, for the scene. Hopefully this will create a really cool shadow for us. Make sure we make this light turn on with sh with shadows. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Getting some long shadows. That's the goal. There we go. It's just so hot, you know. So, let's bring the intensity down. I think that'll do. We can angle it a little bit.

I kind of want it nice and center, but yeah, that does actually look pretty good right here. So, we're using light and we can use one more light source, guys. Go bring it sort of towards the middle here and create some sort of a almost like a scatter. Okay, there we go. So that's that's how you use lighting, symmetry, and and liinal space, honestly, to to set dress. Um, so that it's more of a it's almost like being a graphic designer where you go, okay, I want something over here and then one thing over here. Create some balance in that shot. It's like you're you're like a photographer. You see, as opposed to just throwing couches around and just saying, "Okay, I'm done." You're thinking, I have to be a videographer here, a cinematographer here. And think about

every moment, right? The player walks into this scene. What do we want it to look like? A creepy couch over here. You want to guide the eye, throw in a rug. Now, let's use color. Okay, this is sort of the final talking point here. Let's use some color to make this scene really work. This couch does not match our scene, nor does the rug. So, let's quickly adjust our rug color to be like a green color. So important. We're going to use like a greenish color here. I don't love that. This is a custom one I did four years ago. Save it. Yeah, there we go. And then we can with back rooms, you really don't

want uh color complimentary color going on. And also when you're flipping assets, you want to make sure that the textures match like the texture fidelity matches. So this texture is a little bit too soft and not dirty enough. So, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take the carpet um texture and I'm going to use that to create some visual cohesion cohesion with our chairs. Um, this is definitely not here. Let's make this a PSD. Where's our freaking carpet? There we go. So, I'm going to grab this here. Copy that. And obviously, you could take create a tile. Actually, let's just go ahead and create a pattern. I'm going to define a pattern here. Um, boom. We're going to call that carpet. And then if I create a new pattern here, it should show up. There it is. There we go. I'm going to scale it up a little bit.

I'm going to set it to overlay. Uh, and then we also [clears throat] we want to just adjust our coloring here. We don't want it to be green. We want it to be an ugly yellow. There we go. That's our chair. So, I can grab that chair texture. Um, this right here. And I can just drag it in and put it there. Okay. Let's increase the texture. Uh, the uh twill, decrease the twill size. Is that the word twill? We go. Save it. Good. I'm going to reduce the normal mapage. And no smoothness. So, it's just a dull flat chair. I think we could actually get away with red. This is a little too green. I'm going to make it yellow. Same thing here, guys. Let's go ahead and add some of that carpet pattern. There we go. So, it's it has a little bit more fidelity to it. There we go. See? See? We're see how we're slowly creating visual cohesion cohesion. Uh

this I'm going to make it red. An ugly dingy red. Saturation up. And then, watch this. We're going to create some uh I don't know if it's going to work, but we're going to try it. Just some uh subtle shifts in in tone. Yeah. And then I'm also going to throw some disgusting vomit on it. Okay. Chair. Now, it's not going to be perfectly unwrapped, I will tell you. So, you kind of have to play with it a little bit. This is more of an asset flipping thing. Um, as opposed to creating it from scratch where you'll use like Substance Painter. Yeah, that that's fine. Actually, I don't see a huge problem with that. And what you can do is sort of fade out all the edges and just use it as kind of a stamp. Just creates some disgust, you know? A lot of games from the early 2000s and

frankly games even now, they just everything's dirty. And I think the reason why is because it makes it's an easy way to make things look good. Uh and and like have that high fidelity. Yeah. There we go. There we go. Um this is this is very uh clean. So again, we're talking about asset flipping here. Let's pretend this is an asset. This is not. I think this is a custom. This might be No, this is custom. Filipe did this one. Regardless, to create visual cohesion, sometimes you can just grab textures from your game and bring them into all the other textures and create this cohesion. You're like, "What? You want to use carpet? I guess we're going to create some subtle just rustic. I'm I can even add a ton of sharpness to this. I'm just trying to add a little bit of texture to everything. I know that sounds weird. Just hang tight. And then I could go to that grunge that we

have and bring that in as well. Yes. Just grungify all of this. Now, obviously, you want to do this in your [clears throat] Substance Painter files, but in this case, because these are already sort of baked and Filipe did these a long time ago, I'm fine with just adding some grunge here. See? So, now things look like there's a little bit more cohesion. I'm going to reduce the shine. [clears throat] I don't really care about metallic to be honest because I want it to have that sort of flat uh um halflife. I love I don't know why, but I love the flat tone of HalfLife games. There's not a lot of shine. Do you guys see what we're doing here? Does this make sense? Let me turn the sound on.

There's cohesion here. And it doesn't really look asset flippy if I'm being honest. Looks good. Actually, maybe I should make this. Uh, one final thing I wanted to show you is, um, I'm just going to add an audio source to the lamp. Why not? Uh, I mean, I guess I could find a radio. Maybe I have a radio here. Yeah, I have a radio. Yeah, we could just throw a radio. No, that's that's too interactable. We don't have time for that. There's a bunch of interaction stuff on that. So, I can just throw an audio source on here. I'm going to make it 3D. I'm going to set it to a custom rolloff. I'm going to set it to 100. And you could see where it's going to go, by the way. So, it's that's way too big. So, I want it to just be a subtle reverbby sound that's playing as I come in the room of like jazz, old jazz, you know?

So, set this to loop here. And I'm going to see if there's any public domain songs that we've got. There we go. I'm going to set it to loop reverb zone. Wix mix. I'm going to set it to one, but make sure we have a reverb zone, right? So, I'm going to go to audio audio reverb zone. I'm going to set it to right here. This room is going to have a room reverb. This stuff matters, guys. Um, it really does. We're just going to do a standard room. And if you can't tell, I'm ready to start my new game. Uh because I'm so I'm just excited. I'm gonna set this to 0.7. Um with a volume of 04. Also, our other our back room's ambient sound was way too loud. So, we're going to 0 2. And we're going to start the player here. And let's see how it feels.

There's a little bit too much uh Doppler. See? So, what we could do is set the Doppler level to is it five or zero? I can't remember. Um we're going to set it to really quiet. No, no, no. That was the the back room's ambience. [snorts] This is the Doppler. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, we need to go to our our lamp, set the Doppler level to zero, spread to 360, and we're going to go really quiet. And we're going to go subtle like 04 pitch. Okay. Um, the reverb zone is not

Let's set the minimum distance to No, we're good. I I kind of want it to be a little bit more reverbby. So, let's let's go to living room and hit apply. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I think that's everything. We've talked about occlusion culling. We've talked about optimization. I hope that was helpful. Do you guys have any quick questions for me before we wrap up here? As you guys write your questions in the chat, I want to say one big final thank you to Loick, Whitney, Montreal, Martin, Andreas, Antony, Dauci, Brian, Seth, Lorenzo, Victor, and all those other guys who

I've shouted out multiple times this week. Uh, if you guys want to um check out Fulltime GameDev, please check it out. You got nine days left, 16 hours to join Fulltime GameDev, which is my massive program. I've got 4,500 students worldwide. Thomas, you've been shouting out this course a lot this week. That's because it's Black Friday. It's Black Friday, so it's a big sale. It's my biggest sale of the year, so I always go pretty hard with this thing. Honestly, it helps fund the studio through Q1 of 2026. So, I'm really grateful to even be able to do this. Um, but more importantly, I think it's going to help you guys. I really do. I think that full-time game devs are going to help you a ton. And look, I used to have I'll be honest, I used to be very insecure about shouting out this course because I was like, maybe it's not going to help people. But I had students going full-time. It was wild. Like, I'd always get these messages like, "Hey, I went full-time." And I was like, really? So, people did actually go full-time. So, I posted a couple of their screenshots here. There's more people outside of these screenshots, but um I just wanted to share these with you guys. Students either whether it's, you know,

Kickstarter or game sales or publishers, they went full-time and they're now making indie games. So, [snorts] you're also going to get my 2D art program, my 3D art program, my YouTube program, totally free, but only for this sale. And also my stream my game program completely free. this full-time game dev program here. You're going to learn how to pitch to publishers, how to do Kickstarter campaigns, how to make a game in Unity, GDAU, Unreal. You can take your pick. You don't have to learn all of them. Just pick one. You'll learn how to code in C. You're going to learn how to reach out to publishers, reach out to streamers, get people to play your game, hit the Steam front page, all that stuff. It's really, really cool. And more importantly, you're going to learn how to stay motivated. There's a massive Discord server, very kind, helpful people on the server as well. So, hey, check it out below. See if it's something for you. And by the way, if you're a student, let me know in the chat and I will give you a quick shout out here. Um, also let me know what you think about the program. Okay. Um, questions. Do we have any questions here? Uh, [sighs]

any other questions here, guys? Back rooms is brain rot, but he's using it to explain atmosphere and set design. So, it was a win. Well, thank you. I'm I'm using backrooms because that's a great place to start to learn because set design is simple. The whole point is that it's simple. Liinal space hinges on simplicity. Um, no, you cannot ask questions later because I'm going to be gone for the weekend.
[laughter]
Um yeah. Yeah, I think we'll do we'll do more streams like this next week. But um hey, we'll also do um we'll I'll play your games next week as well. Do I miss the old Mac? Oh, yeah. I do miss Mac. I miss Mac a lot. Um yeah, I really do actually.

Pro tip, learn some basic Blender. Okay. Back rooms is a urban legend. Uhhuh. Would you recommend learning 3D modeling over coding since coding can mostly somewhat be accomplished by AI? Um, you need to learn to code. You need to learn to code. Even if you're gonna use AI, you got to know. Um, no, no, I don't want to use Linux. Why, Thomas? I don't know. I just don't want to. But I've heard great things. Seriously, uh, Zoken, I'm just messing with you. Um, I've I've learn heard great things about Linux, but I don't I just there's a lot

of stuff out there. It's like, you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do this. And I'm like, no, I'll do I just want to do what I want to do. Um, because I want to enjoy myself, right? It's like, if I want to use ProBuilder, I'm going to use ProBuilder. I'm sorry. Your next games will be awesome with all this new knowledge from the start. Thank you. When is Twisted Tower coming out? I don't know. Um, all right. Looks like I got to learn to code. Yeah. Yeah, learn to code. It really does help. It really does help. You love You love Linux. That's awesome. GDAU is the only stable engine on Linux. What is the best way to make a level with a purpose and not have it be too much or too little when there is a purpose? That's such a good question. Play testing. play testing. It's almost impossible to know if your level's big, too big, or too small.

If it's too sprawling, if it's too complicated. It's hard to know any of this as the developer. It's much easier to know when you sit down with a notepad and you I sit right here, and I'll have people come over to my studio, and I'll just sit and I'll watch them play, and then I'm like, "Holy crap, this level is 60% too big." and I'm going to cut it and trim it and and polish just the small portions of it. I wouldn't have known that had I had I not tested with people. And I'm I'm I'm getting that information right now. You know, some levels in Twisted Tower just it's like what in the world? Way too big. Uh did I see the Unity and Unreal collab? I I don't know what that's about, honestly. [groaning] What is that about? Are you depending on AI for some coding? Yeah. Do you still recommend publisher deals or Kickstarter in 2026? Yes. Um, publisher deals and Kickstarter campaigns are not something new. They're

not old either. They're just it's just standard. It's like uh in publisher deals, all it is is investment. That's all it is. Uh it's rich people or rich companies or people with investment money who want to put money into projects that make money. It will always be a thing. It might not be called publishers. It might be called angel investors or just investment or whatever. Uh it's it's always that it's going to always be there. And if you need if you need money, [snorts] find a rich friend, find a rich family member who wants to get a return on their money or go reach out to a bunch of these publishers and they're always going to be around. They're just going to maybe act differently or do different things. Kickstarters, same thing. It's like crowdfunding. People supporting pay patronage. Patronage has been around since what, 500 AD or even longer. Patronage, it's just democratized now. So instead of going to, let's say, uh, Prince Charles as Bach, I don't know,

and and trying to get funding for your musical compositions, you're going to Prince Charles and and a hundred other people who follow you and saying, "Hey guys, I need money." You're going to like this project. It's it's and you get your name on the instead of your name being printed on the ca or carved on the castle wall or the statue, it's carved into the credits of the game. Um, it's never really going to go away. Patronage and patronage, by the way, patronage is more of a sympathy or generosity thing of pe and people just wanting to partner with you. Um, whereas investment is they want a return on their money. Patronage and investment are always going to be around. how it's done, what platforms are used, and what what the strategy is is always going to shift and change. So, yeah, I don't I don't think publishers or or or crowdfunding are something that will go away or that you need to steer away from. I think it's always it's always in my mind. I'm always like, well, okay,

for my next game, what do I do? Do I use Patreon? Do I build a membership program? Do I do I uh do a membership on on p like do I do use patrons on Patreon or do I do like membership where I serve the patrons with community uh or do I do I re go go talk to some rich friends you know or call my daddy. Uh there's a bunch of options or self-fund it you know there's a bunch of ways to do it. Um, so when writing a story, at what point do you know if it's good or not? Boy, I think it has to do with Okay, so I believe you can hear God. There's a there is a there is the times when you

you're like I think maybe like maybe I heard God and then there's times where you're like oh he just talked to me. Those are few and far between. The same is true with a story. There's like a moment where you're like, "Oh, that's it." and you just know and you know it works and it's so rare. Um, and I haven't had that feeling in a long time, but you know, you just know you know it works. Um, it's you could smell it. It's like almost like a stench. Y'all ever use smelling salts where you Oh, that's like a good story. It's like I you just know. You could just feel it. If you're wondering whether it's a good story or you're like, I don't even know, it probably isn't a good story. But if you just boom and you could feel it and and it also flows out of you naturally,

it's probably a really good story. That's that's all I've got for that. Um, so I don't know why the chat is so delayed, but yeah. Uh, yeah. Okay. Um, what comes first story or level design? Both. Both. So, the way that I write story and I've always written story this way. And I was talking to um I guess I could tell you guys I got a podcast with American McGee. He's the creator of Alice Madness Returns. The Alice game franchise. He told he told me he writes his story in at the beginning of a game and he before they even start the game he writes the story uh or he works with people to write the story whereas for me it's um I'll write it down

For me, it's a loop. I'm not saying this is right. I'm just telling you what it is. For me, it's this everlasting horrible expensive loop of I'm going to design the level or design the game or design the uh the or design the economy of the game and then I produce it and then I ah the story would be really cool here and then I play test and play test and play test and I just go in this giant loop over and over and over again um over and over and over and it's uh I've redone all of the dialogue in the game two or three times and I reach I reach out to the the voice actors and actors at this point on a weekly basis and I'm like, "Hey, I need this line or I need this line or I need this line." So,

um so yeah, that's that's it guys. That's all I got time for. Thanks so much for hanging out. If you want a shout out on Monday, feel free to check out the course below. Please just at least check it out, guys. And there's a 30-day money back guarantee. If you're if you're just not feeling the course, there's no risk. I will send you your money back, no questions asked. You don't even have to email me. Email my assistant and just say, "Hey, I want a refund." And you'll get a refund. So, no no risk there. So, check out the course below. See if it's something you're interested in. Take a look. You know, grab the course at this massive discount. Open it up and see what you