Converting My Unity RPG From 2D To 3D

[Music] hello and welcome back to another amber roots devlog it's been a while since my last update but i've been working away behind the scenes here and i'm super excited to show you guys what i've been up to there are some pretty major changes to discuss one of the changes you might notice is i have a new desk and with it i was able to get some monitor arms which make the whole setup just way more comfortable so i'm very happy with it but enough about that now let's talk about amber roots so my original plan was to put out this devlog a lot sooner than this and i was working on a couple of smaller systems one of which was a system for item pickups so rather than using containers of items for everything items would just fall on the ground and you would be able to interact with them and pick them up another system i was working on was a system for purifying corrupted ambers so my idea was that when you fought corrupted monsters they would drop their corrupted ambers and you would be able to take them to a station in your ranch and purify them the whole process would require certain items to complete things like that and it would be a way for the player to acquire new monsters i was making pretty good headway into these systems when i guess you could say inspiration struck a few videos ago when i was showing off the different biomes like the beach in the mountains i was struggling with how to implement a couple of ideas that i had for those biomes and i started thinking that some of those ideas might be easier to implement if amber roots had a different perspective this led me down a rabbit hole of different thoughts and ideas about what i could do ultimately i decided that it would be safer and cleaner if i just tried to prototype some of these ideas in a brand new project rather than trying to immediately integrate them into my main unity project so i put some time into it and i did a bit of a deep dive into some techniques that i wasn't familiar with at all and i wound up with this [Music] [Music] okay so the first and most obvious change is that this whole thing is in 3d which is a pretty major change for amber roots but i have to say i'm fairly excited about the new opportunities that something like this would bring i also started experimenting with shaders and post-processing effects and those are two things that i have virtually no experience with but i have to say i'm really happy with how this is turning out visually i think the shaders and the post-processing make the game look a lot more alive and a lot more polished there's still a long way to go and a lot more polish to be put into the effects but i'm really happy with how this is turning out in all the time i've worked on amber roots i don't think i've ever been as happy with the visual style of the game as i am with this alright so let's go into a little bit more detail about what exactly is going on in this 3d prototype a large portion of the art is still in 2d and i'm using a technique called sprite billboarding this changes the rotation of a sprite based on a camera's position this has a really nice effect where you've got a 2d sprite that's always looking at the camera and though it's a technique that's still used today especially by some indie games i definitely recognize it a lot in some retro games like daggerfall and doom where you had 3d environments that were fairly new at the time and 2d sprites walking around in those environments that used billboarding i don't have much experience at all with 3d modeling and 3d animation especially for characters and animals and that sort of thing so getting the sprite billboarding to work was a pretty crucial part of the prototype fortunately it really wasn't that hard unity has a lot of already built in settings for this sort of thing so that made it really easy the hardest part was playing the right animations and flipping the sprite depending on the position of the camera but even that part wasn't so bad i just needed to do a little bit of vector math to get that working right personally i'm a big fan of sprite billboarding i think it can look really really nice and it can give games a unique look so the reason i'm trying these techniques out in this prototype is number one because i really like the way it looks and number two because there were a few elements of 2d that had me a little frustrated i was trying to push through those frustrations because i was intimidated by the prospect of making 3d models and animations but once i got the sprite billboarding working well 3d felt like a great solution for some of the frustrations i was having the biggest of which being how i was handling environmental changes and the verticality of the world i wanted the player to feel like they could really go to different places and explore different parts of the scene or level and i just wasn't satisfied with how that was being handled in 2d this became more apparent to me when i made that video about biomes that included the beach in the mountains using the stairs on the cliff side of the mountain to go up to simulate verticality worked well enough but it just wasn't really the effect i wanted i also wanted to leave myself open to the idea of underwater exploration but that was going to have to be a totally different scene in 2d i really wanted to emphasize the importance of exploration in amber roots and i know that this is totally subjective and up to each individual's taste but i guess i just find myself enjoying 3d exploration more don't get me wrong i love top down 2d games but when i think about the games that i really get lost in looking behind every nook and cranny those tend to be 3d games for me i think of games like the elder scrolls series and other games like it i added a first person camera to this prototype which i think works well and it makes it easier to more accurately interact with the world i also added a couple of objects here to test out basic interaction you can see the crosshair changes color when something can be interacted with and when i interact with them they just disappear from the world the first person camera also works really well in exploring these underground or indoor locations my current plan is to make things like dungeons a very common part of amber roots i also added things like sprinting and being able to swim around as well as a variety of other little effects now when i started working on this prototype it was with the perspective of trying something new out that i wasn't sure i was going to implement into amber roots as such there's a lot of things here that could still use a lot of work in particular there's not a lot of variety i only have one tree model for example some of the textures need to be remade as they're not the best and the environment itself is really rather simple and doesn't have a lot going on but this was just meant to be a quick little playground where i could test out whether or not this is actually a fun direction to take the game in and to me the answer is yes i'm probably having more fun running around this environment in spite of the lack of game mechanics than i was in 2d so i think the next step is to start importing systems from my 2d project into here that way i'm going through one system at a time and modifying the things that might need to be modified for 3d and admittedly that process is going to take a little while but the more time i spend with this prototype the more i think that it will really be worth it and that amber roots as a whole will really benefit from the new direction but i really want to know what everyone thinks so please leave me a comment and give me some feedback about this it's a really big change for amber roots and i'm personally very excited about it though it will mean some extra work but yeah if you enjoyed this video please give me a thumbs up and if you're new around here and you want to see more of amber roots you can subscribe and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: Paper Mouse Games

Views: 37,268

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Id: t6BB_JXPEjw

Length: 7min 51sec (471 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021