I HAND-CRAFTED a WORLD for my RPG Game

I’ve been working on an RPG game about witches  called Mana Valley for the past few months   and the support has been absolutely incredible.  So seriously, thank you to everyone who has been   watching and is subscribed. I originally thought  the game would have a super small audience so I  

Wasn’t too concerned about performance. When  I started one, of the assets I was using only   worked with unity’s built-in renderer  so I decided to use that for my project.   Turns out the unity docs say its newer up  rendering is “poggers for performance” and  

“totally the future man”. So since over 300,000  of you have been cool enough to wish list Mana   Valley on steam I want to make sure even Jonas’s  toaster can run it. But changing renderers means   every single material and light is affected so it  makes sense to switch sooner rather than later.

Oh, there’s just one material I have to fix. After a couple days of feeling like  I was drowning in Pepto-Bismol and   finicking with lighting, I think the game  should look generally the same. Actually,   this is the first time I’ve seen them side by  side and they don’t look anything alike do they…  

At least I built a frame per second counter  and that initially showed improvements.   The thing is… I forgot to write down what  FPS I was getting before I made the switch   and I can’t remember so… for the sake of  argument, let’s just say this change gave us  

1,000 percent increase in FPS. Okay, now that’s  done, over the past few weeks I’ve developed an   issue with this checker texture I’ve been staring  at for months. It’s simply got to go. Luckily   Unity, the sponsor of this video, developed a  really cool feature for the terrain tool that lets  

You paint textures and I’ve been having a ton of  fun using it. I spent a bunch of time working on   the starting area for Mana Valley, sculpting and  painting as I went. And while painting everything   a single texture will make your game look like  it’s straight out of the 90s, actually painting  

And mixing textures can look pretty good. Games  like Escape from Tarkov and Firewatch, which were   both made using Unity, are great examples  of what the terrain tool can help achieve.   Unity also has free resources specifically about  terrain on Unity Learn which I wish I would have  

Looked into before starting this process. But  I was honestly kind of in a trance because   terrain painting and sculpting was incredibly  relaxing for me and I enjoyed it so much. After   I had the terrain painted I moved on to manually  placing trees and the relaxing part disappeared.  

After about 30 minutes of placing trees, I looked  at my project to realize i had accidentally copied   a low poly version of the tree and had to redo  all of that work. But thankfully… I’m full of  

Mistakes and at some point while fixing my last  mistake I realized I missed a spot when texture   painting and because I have grandpa-like  control of my mouse, I accidentally hovered   over this button and the text that showed  up was like a message sent from heaven.  

That’s neat right? But get this… It  also aligns the trees to the terrain   even if you change the terrain after you place  them. It can also randomize height and rotation   which is super important when you’re trying  to make a handful of tree assets not feel  

Like a handful of tree assets. And possibly my  biggest discovery, while it’s called paint trees,   you can actually use it to paint any prefab. So  I’ve been using it for everything that goes on   the ground like rocks and grass too. I know I’m  geeking out a little bit here but honestly I had  

No idea this feature existed to the point where  a few months ago I made an editor script to place   objects on the terrain for me and I know at  least one other developer who’s done the same,  

Because I got the idea from this video. “I really  can’t be bothered to manually scatter these around   though so I decided to write a little script that  will align it with the ground below.” Regardless,   creating the starting area has been helpful  in bringing the story of Mana Valley to life,  

So much so that it inspired a vision for an intro  cut scene that I couldn’t get out of my head… So   I just made it. This was something I had never  really done before and it ended up coming out  

Pretty much exactly how I had envisioned. The  only missing part is that I also imagined Morgan   Freeman narrating it. I professionally approached  him via tweet and am just waiting to hear back.   In the meantime, my most immediate milestone is  to get the game to an alpha so a small group of  

People can start testing. That means  having a playable game. So naturally,   I spent time making these  little animations for save slots   and because I know how heartbreaking it would be  if you accidentally fat-fingered your save file,   there’s also a confirm screen. Clicking a save  slot does exactly what you’d think and clicking  

“new game” will take you to a new loading  screen and then through the intro cut scene. I know some of you had asked for the option for  a more masculine character, one of the things   I enjoy about this particular character  style is that it lends itself pretty well  

To gender ambiguity. Which is just a fancy way of  saying that it may not always be obvious whether a   character is a boy or girl. So during character  customization, you’ll be provided with a bunch   of customization options, even more than you see  here, and you’ll be able to make those choices  

For yourself. I even went as far as having the  random names that are generated for new characters   be gender neutral. And if you have any suggestions  of your own let me know. After the player confirms   their customization, the camera shifts and now  they’re in the story. And then it takes about  

Five seconds before the immersive experience  is completely broken by a lack of floor, walls,   and anything to do. “Just add floors  and walls” you say? Here’s the thing.   These house parts come from an asset I’m using  when I tried to use them to assemble my own design  

Everything had to be scaled down and nothing  aligned to a grid. Often times 3d art is based   on look and feel and that’s fine for most people  but I have a background in architecture and   despite my repeated attempts to defeat that part  of me, I need order and precision. So for whatever  

Dumb reason I opted to edit these assets to the  scale I need them, put them at a module size,   and relocate their center points in a useful  location. On the surface, that may not seem like   a big deal until you realize I’m scaling these  modules non-uniformly. So all the UVs have to be  

Redone. A UV is basically just how a texture gets  assigned to a surface. In addition to that, most   of these assets have LOD options so I actually  need to edit multiple models. If you’re unfamiliar   with the concept of an LOD, it just means level  of detail and Unity has this feature where you  

Can assign different meshes to an LOD group. This  allows you to use less detailed models when the   camera is far from an object and more detailed  ones when the player is close. I’m committed to  

Doing that because I think it will be worth it in  the long run but it does really slow down progress   in the meantime. So that’s my current task which  will be followed by adding crafting and building.  

Until I get to those, you can watch this  video to see how I added flying to the game.