How to get Puppet Combo Style Visuals in Unity | Unity Retro PS1 Tutorial

growing up I got to play a lot of these old PlayStation one classic titles and honestly getting to play these games on a Sunday afternoon was one of the best memories I had of my childhood it's kind of funny that how much we're trying to recreate this old feeling of nostalgia on these modern game engines and one Game Dev just stands out when we talk about this like you know PS1 aesthetic and that's of course puppet combo they somehow all the time nail this perfect feeling of nostalgia and fear just it it just lurks in between of that childhood feeling and feeling of just you know these low poly pixelized walls it just feels so uncanny and feels so nostalgic at the same time so I tried my best uh re trying to recreate something like that using the game engine called Unity now Unity has seen some downfalls but I've still uh decided to stuck around with unity and this is what I was able to cook up I this is like closest that I can get to the um original style and I have noticed that some of these assets which are completely free and open source by the way are also um used by the puppet combo devs themselves like this VHS filter especially is the one that they use for most of their games I don't know if they do it anymore but on the previous titles some such as those um you know nun Massacre or other other some of their titles they have used this particular um asset so in today's video I'm going to be just demonstrating how you can achieve a a style that suits that old school VHS type of feeling and just fills the gap of your retro in the PlayStation one style game I'm going to be covering the uh shaders as well and also I'm going to be covering how you can set this up to look uh somewhat like what it would look like on an actual uh puppet combo game there are some ups and downs you can completely tweak it around to make it look however you want but I got uh I got this result which I think looks very convincing and so yeah let's um let me just show you how to get started we're going to start by creating a new Unity project I'm going to create it on the uh core I'm not going to be using the universal render pipeline because most of these assets that I found are for the built-in render pipeline so once that is done I have imported a model of a store that I have previously created and as you can see it doesn't look all that good because there's basically not anything going around this just the unities uh standard materials and standard shading so we're going to change that we're going to start by setting up the graphics for this part I'm going to be specifically focusing on the way the game itself itself looks you can skip this part because I have made a lot of videos on how to create a p uh how to create PS1 Style game before you can watch one of those I'll be linking them down in the description basically what I'm going to be doing is using this free uh Shader from h. called the Retro 3D Shader and I'm going to be importing it changing all my textures sizes and and you know all that basic stuff I'm going to be changing their filtering mode to point no filter I'm also going to be uh down sampling the texture um resolution some might need more than the other ones for example this tile texture you would realize it's when when you lower the texture you would realize that the tile itself is not properly um displaying that pixelation so you can select this tile texture and I'm going to lower it even more than the other ones so like this you have to you know uh start with the basics just change your textures make materials after that you need to switch the uh material type to uh the Retro Duty pack I'm going to be using the flat lit sh Shader here because this is the one that uh works the best you can look around for the other options as well but I think flat lit looks the best because this uh also works with the lights on your scene but at the same time it also captures that you know PS1 style stretching and jittering and everything else you also want to you know uh adjust the fine texture mapping and the J ring values I have properly explained all of these before but I'm just going to run through some of the settings and just you know look around to see if the pixelation is right on the textures and if the material itself is working now do keep in mind it will depend on how many vertices your models have so you might have to you know subdivide your models a little bit more and another thing is that you need to change your lights setting on this on this rendering option you might want to set it to Auto to have that you know look just right because I I realize that auto ones just work fine but on the other hand some of the other ones don't so you have to you know just play around to see which one works which rendering temp works so I have set the graphics up for the shaders and stuff and this is the result we've gotten this is pretty straightforward there's no post-processing applied whatsoever and now we're going to be going to the main part of adding the main effects we can start by installing the postprocessing uh package provided by unity and also creating a post processing layer do keep in mind you will need the pro processing package for this the post processing stack since we're using the standard pipeline you have to set it up and also on the anti-aliasing set this to the temporal anti-aliasing which will give you this sharpness option which you can increase to just give it that extra bit of sharpness I'm going to also show you another method to add the Lum metric sharpening and from here I have created a basic Pro processing profile not a lot of been added from now over here we need to start adding the Retro effects which you will get from get inside of the uh main Shater itself you also want to uh change other settings from your camera and stuff just you know do your thing but you can follow along my settings as well if you want to again this is all pretty standard and honestly you can watch uh some of these things going to detail on my other videos I will link them down to the description so once you've added the Retro effects on the uh post processing thing you will get some of these options first one is the pixelation option I've talked about this before but this basically allows you to control the amount of pixels on your screen I would usually leave this on default or maybe increase it a lot or maybe just keep it on a sweet spot from um I don't know I I usually just tweak around to see which looks better on different scenes it would look different so you have to you know sort of like decide for yourself so we're not really looking for the pixelation thing we're looking for the color depth and the dithering this basically allows you to add at the at the at the death ring so yeah so uh one thing to keep in mind while doing that you also want to change around other settings to see how it affects your scene on the other post-processing things so I usually start by making my personal profile of post processing with the bu and effects first and after that I add the Retro effects to just change the the overall feel of it like the contrast and the you know color depth so the color depth is basically like you know cutting off the color and minimizing the amount of Shades you have on your scene available so with this we can also combine the dithering effect basically the amount of areas that are being cut off by the limited amount of color space it's going to be replaced with the deing so select the deing and apply these ding effect which you will also get inside of that retro effects panel just search for dther on the texture part and you should be good to go and once you have it you need to just you know scale the dithering as you would like to if you don't see the dithering completely forming on your screen that's because you have to lower the color depth in order to see the amount of diing being applied if I lower the color depth you will realize that on the um on the edges of the areas where the color is being fall off you will see the dther is there and it's present and this is the effect that I was talking about you don't really need a lot of it just a subtle amount with will do really good so don't add a lot of color depth don't make it too dark for the eyes otherwise it will not look um very good and depending on your scene you might have to change it tweak it but that's it once you have something you're happy with the scene we're done and now we're going to be starting with the VHS St VHS tape thing so retro V effect is the asset that um the devs or puppet combo themselves use and you can download it for free on your GitHub you might need an account I don't know so once you've done that you have to install it like you know extract it and put it on your unity and then you should get this CRT effect uh effect uh script which you have to directly apply to your camera once you do that there are a lot of options that you have to change and tweak around to make it look just right so from here the first thing you uh will notice that there's not a lot of options so you really don't have to worry about messing it up it's completely customizable you can change it however you want to but some of the settings that I have went through I will be showing it on the screen so you can just copy around there are some options such as this you know RGB thing that you can slide to change the red green and blue amount on your screen I think this personally isn't really something that I need the things that we're going to be focusing on is the RF noise the tape which is like basically like the quality and we're going to be also focusing on the eletric sharpening which is on the end of the screen we also need to um you know adjust the RF noise to a little bit lower so that uh doesn't everything doesn't get like really messed up and that should be it so this is the setting that I'm going to be going with you can copy it around around and you should be good to go and again like I said this is completely customizable and you really don't have to make it look exactly the way you want to but I think the way that I have been able to modify it to change it I think it looks really close to the puppet combo style and this is the final result with the VHS effect we're of course not fully done yet this was just the start and we are going to be adding two more extra effects on top of it just to you know completely tie it all together and finish it up so I was able to find another asset which is really cool and you have to like you know sort of modify it to use it but this is the asset so this is the one that has been taken off from GitHub I have previously talked about this this is the one that I have talked about on my previous VHS video you can also watch that if you want to this has been taken off GitHub but thankfully I had a fork of it so you can just open it uh from you can just download it download the code open the assets folder over here and from here you would see a lot of options but we're only going to be needing the RGB shift and the b tv effect so drag and drop the um postprocess folder to your main uh uh Unity project do not drag the entire thing onto your project otherwise it will cause a lot of issues so don't do that and once you've done that just add the RGB shift thing to your um camera and then click on the uh script and it will show you the folder you need to assign the uh Shader material and then when you hit play you should see that the RGB shift is happening now you need to set this the speed to zero and you need to adjust the RGB values to like you know split the r red green and blue channels into uh parallel lines so that it looks good now do keep in mind that um this effect has to be very very subtle not a lot you can't add a lot of it otherwise it will be very headache inducing inducing when you uh you know full screen the game you might not realize it just yet because it's on a like on a lower screen right now on a smaller size display but when you uh you know make the screen bigger on a 7 1080p display it will be very nauseating to watch so don't add a lot of it just add a little bit of it and another thing to not notice is that it the effect is only uh visible when you hit play otherwise it will be not visible so you need to hit play and then you need to adjust the settings and then you need to copy it and once you exit out of the play mode you need to paste those copy settings while being in the play mode to the ones that is when you're not on the play mode it's a bit confusing I know you just basically uh need to you know adjust the setting while being on the play mode and being in the play mode is not going to save your settings so keep that in mind it's just a tip for the beginners who are just starting up the unit so once this is done we're going to be adding another Effect called a bat TV effect which is uh which is fine but we have to edit that effect out a little bit because for some reason the effect doesn't have like you know a speed slider and basically the bad TV effect kind of shifts your entire screen from up to down so we kind of have to edit it ourself no you don't don't really have to worry about it just open this Shader file that you will get on the bat TV effect folder and then all you need to do is to just basically scroll scroll down all these um confusing texts and find one line that calls float Barrel speed or the ru speed over here and which is set to 05 meaning that that's the speed and you just need to change it to zero so that it doesn't really move anymore and once you've done that just save your script get back into your Unity project and hit play and you will realize that damn you are a programmer congratulations you just made your own effect okay so one last effect that we're going to be adding is the unity VHS glitch and this basically is it's the name is kind of misleading it's an Shader that basically um overlays a VHS mp4 file on top of your screen it's really help it's really helpful but the settings aren't just right you need to adjust them a little bit so once you get the uh uh asset from GitHub you just need to drag and drop as usual opening it up with wi and it will take a little bit a while and once that's done you need to edit it out a little bit so there are uh two of these glitch effects over here so you just need to use one of them or you can even add more I will leave a playlist Link in the description for you to be able to you know use uh any video from YouTube you want that has this like you know this like overlay VHS overlay type of thing has a black background to it so once you've get once you get this you need to apply this to your main camera as usual like you did with all the other effects however like I mentioned this basically overlays a mp4 file on top of your screen you need to First add in a video player and once you do you need to add in the glitch uh effect MP4 or any other MP4 that you want if you want a custom effect on top of it now all you need to do is to locate the script of the VHS effect that you just got and then you need to just drag and drop it to your main camera and you will re you will realize everything just goes black for a second because you have to again adjust the the uh the script of the Shader so you need to find the VHS uh thing you need to just type that in and you should get it and if you still see a dark all you need to do is to just drag that script on top of it or maybe the video player on top of it and you'll realize it looks good but it doesn't look good at the same time it looks very trippy and weird so to fix this we have to again edit the Shader you don't have to worry about it just you know you just need to edit it out a little bit you don't have to worry let me just real quick show you just hit on the Shader and once you find it just double tap on it and it will open it on a visual studio so from here you need to just adjust some of the parameters which I will show or otherwise you can just copy paste from the link in the description I will be leaving a link for the enti Shader itself you can download that and use that instead just so that I don't messed up I created a copy version of the original one and then I started editing the one that I've copied I just need to change some of the color values which some you might just get it around over here some of the float values over here you can just watch me doing it or you can just like you know copy paste the one that I have put in the description and there you have it this is what it looks like after I have assigned it to the main camera and I've edited some of the color values to make it look a little bit more accurate to the main scene and well this is it this is the final version with all the effects and everything applied like I said you can use a custom um uh video overlay on top of it if you want to but I think it looks just fine the way it is you can also turn off the Bad TV effect if you don't like it it's it's personally not used on the perect combo games but I think it's just a really cool cool addition to the uh you know the overall aesthetic I've turned off the Bad TB effect right now so it looks really good you can also use some of the other ones like the other effects I will be leaving a link in the description for a uh playlist that has some of these uh VHS style you know overlays for MP4 files you need to download those um video files drag and drop them to your project and then you can just you know change it on the VHS effect uh script over here so yeah this is basically the final version you can then again edit some of the other effects this low metric sharpening that increases the sharpening of your scene and I personally like it because it just gives you that you know sort of like a sharp looking uh scene when it's already being pixelated when it's coming to your screen like it's being output on the output it's being pixelated but you can just sharpen the overall scene you know it it just looks good don't ask me why it just looks good you can again increase the sharpening the sharpening is uh clamed at four but you can edit the script find the uh litri Sharp sharpening float and you can just increase the value to range to whatever you want but personally I think for this particular scene it looks just fine now you can adjust the post- processing volume values and all the other things to your per your liking but I was satisfied with this so yeah that answers your question how you can create a puppet combo style puppet combo visual using your unity game engine so well if you like the video a like and a subscribe would be really helpful to grow my little Channel you can also download the entire project file from my patreon or you can buy the entire modified pack on my h. page the links will be given in the description I also have a fiber page if you want something custom done maybe a game maybe a maybe some type of you know visual thingy done in blender you can also um comment down you can also contact me reach me out of fiber but yeah that's it this is the end of the video thanks for watching uh really really uh appreciate your support so far thanks a lot see you later

Channel: aidencantcode

Views: 2,511

Keywords: unity, puppetcombo, gamedevlog, devlog, godot, unityps1, retrops1horror, itch

Id: xXo2rnaSnLo

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024