Markiplier! This man needs absolutely no
introduction. If you're this channel, you probably know who he is. I've had the opportunity to work with his generous men, for over six years now and it's safe to say that, without him I would not be here today.
He has helped me so much, in my youtube channel in my life and I am so, but so much, of what I am and
what I have achieved to him. So this year 2019! Yeah,
ah this videos is old! The original plan was to release this back in October of 2019,
around Halloween. But that didn't work out. Then November and then December. Long story short, it was harder than I expected. Now we're almost halfway into 2020. So it's about time this gets done. I'm also letting you know this because, some things I mentioned about the game or the game engine, might be out of date or my
opinion might have changed. Anyways... So grab some snacks and enjoy the video. So, this year 2019, I was reflecting on that and I noticed, that I've never really
thanked him for that. At least, I don't think I have... and, while I was working on the game under 24 hours video, I noticed that his birthday was
coming up. So I decided that I wanted to do something special for him. At first, I thought of doing an animation, but honestly I've made so many animations
for him by now and I wanted to do something different, something special, something for him, specifically and exclusively for him. And I remember that, the month before, May 12th to be more specific, he had released a video called: DAMIEN An animated short about a character he created called: The Damien and as I was looking at it I said I have an idea... What if I made a game adaptation of
Damien?! The problem was I had to finish the game under 24 hours video on June 2nd and marks birthday was on June 28th which meant that I had less than a month,
to work on the whole thing while also, editing for him. So this is the making of
"Damien The Game" So while I was finishing up the game
under 24 hours video, I started thinking of different ideas for the game. One decision that I took right at the beginning and that I never let go was, how much of the animation I was going to turn into a game. Okay, now spoiler warning! If you haven't seen Damien... What are you waiting for?! And second, I'm going to spoil about a half of the video, so you should
definitely go watch it... Right now! I'll put links in the...everywhere! So the part of the animation I thought would best fit a game, would be the exact first half. Aside from the dialogue scenes, most of the first half is just showing you stuff. The snowy environments, Damien's reaction to the weird world around him and of course the amazing scene where he's running in the woods. The end of that first half of the animation seemed perfect to end the game. Plus the scenes afterwards are mostly dialogue, which is a bit complicated to turn into a game. So the length of the animation was decided! Now how would the game work? 2D or 3D?
Was the big debate in my head. Making a game in 2D would probably be easier since I'm used to making games in 2D but it would also be a bit limited in its looks and making a game in 2D scary was going to be pretty challenging especially with
the limited time that I had. On the other hand,
we have 3D. Now if it was in 3D, I knew it had to be in first-person, because making it in third-person would
be extremely challenging due to all the animations needed. Plus Unity already has a nice first person shooter controller that you can use, so, with the limited time that I have I would definitely go with that option. And yes, I would be using, the Unity Game Engine. In the last video, even though I said Unity, a lot of people ask me which game engine that I used. So here it's ah...it's Unity.
I used Unity! And, if I use the High Definition Render Pipeline or HDRP from Unity and yes, that is a name. I knew, I could make the game look really good, considering I could find good looking assets, as it has a lot more options for lighting, and
shadows, and post-process, plus volumetric fog and volumetric lights, which was something that I was very interested in exploring. So to make my decision, I decided to go to the asset store and, if I found an ice pack with a winter forest, I would go with 3D, because the forest and the snow are, easily, the biggest piece of all the animation, in that first half. If I found a forest, everything else should be pretty easy. And after looking for like two minutes,
I found this: The Winter Environment Nature Pack I mean, this looks gorgeous and it had so much stuff. I mean, I'm talking... different types of trees, and branches, and rocks and, weirdly enough, it also works for a non winter scenes. Plus, it had support for the high-definition
render pipeline, which was perfect for me the only downside, it costed actual human
dollars. But honestly, for Mark, it was totally worth it. So it was decided, the game was going to be in 3D. Okay, so I had the winter forest asset but I still needed everything else, including characters. Because of time constraints and limited skills, I took the decision of using Adobe fuse characters. Which is basically, a the same Sims type program, where you can make different characters, it's a bit limited on what you can do, but honestly I couldn't be too picky. My girlfriend being a huge fan of the Sims and wanting to participate in the project made the character models for Damien, Celine and the other dude. For the enemy, I was thinking of using one of the monsters from Mixamo but apparently for some reason... I had a huge pack with different monsters in my unity assets. I probably bought this in like a humble bundle pack or something but I have no recollection of ever buying this. But I'm really glad I did. After looking at some of the characters in that pack, I found one that looked Pretty Gross So I decided to go with that one . The only thing missing was the hair, but again, I couldn't be too picky. At this point I had pretty much
everything I needed and now I just had to put all the pieces together and make
an actual game. Now, the big question is, how do I turn
this animation into a game? You know with gameplay and stuff. The initial plan was to recreate the entire first half as it is, but I quickly realized that to make
it a game I needed to introduce mechanics and maybe even tweak some existing scenes of the animation. Now the thing that Damien
uses pretty much in the entire video is the axe! So I thought, all right, the axe
could definitely be his main weapon. His only weapon, really. The animation starts
with Damien cutting down some trees and taking them into his cabin.
In the game that would be a cutscene. like with the actual animation, that I stole and used without permission. When he gets to the cabin, he starts cutting the wood and that seemed like the perfect place for a tutorial. To teach the player how to move
and how to use the axe in a safe environment. That's exactly, what I
started doing. I place the axe in the player controller and animated a simple idle, walk, run and attack animations for the axe. I also wanted to implement, some
sort of pickup system I had no big idea for it, but at least for the player to grab the wood and place it in the tree stump and use it maybe even in the cabin to place the wood in the fire, to give it some actual
mechanics to the game. Which now that I think of it was a ton of work and I didn't really use it that much. I did a stump that I found on the asset store and by using a quick tutorial from Brackeys. I added some snow on top of it. I programmed the picking up of objects, which took way too long to implement however it worked for pretty much everything I wanted. I tried adding the script to the house
and picking up the house and... OH MY GOD!! Now the placement of the pickup object
was very ... not good. but hey, it works and as I always say:
"As long as it works, that's what matters." After this I added what I called: Missions! Which was basically a way for me to connect with the player. I didn't have a lot of time to do fancy stuff. So text sounded pretty good and fast. Although it wasn't fast. It wasn't fast at all, there were a lot of problems. Text not showing, missions
getting all bugged, but eventually I came up with the system that fixed.
Not super fancy, but it worked. And as long as it works, that's what matters! Very good! After that I made the cabin. At an awesome asset called: Modular Survival Base which looked insane and as the name suggest... Oh god, I bit my lip! which looked amazing, and as the name suggested it was Modular! That basically means, that the asset comes in pieces, and you can set it up in any way you'd like. Which was perfect for me, because I wanted to make a the cabin as similar to the one in the
animation as possible. I started putting some wood on the ground just to check how big it was going to be, and then I started adding walls, windows and the ceiling. It required some finesse. Changing the scale in some of the pieces and what not, but I think, it turned out really good. Because I was using the high definition render pipeline, everything I imported from the asset store had this very weird tendency the of being pink. You basically have to turn every material in your game, to use the high definition render pipeline shader. Fortunately, there is a button that is pretty much the "Fix this for me please." button, but if you don't know where that button is, it can be a bit frustrating and you have to do this pretty much every time you import a new asset. It's not a big deal, especially if you know how to fix it.
It's just a little bit tedious. The cabin also didn't have any snow on it
so, it was back to the brackeys tutorial. For the fireplace, I couldn't find one that looked exactly as I wanted with the chimney that I wanted. So I had to improvise and mix two fireplaces together. Absolutely beautiful. I tweaked the terrain and I also placed
a fence around the house, even though there is none in the animation, to make sure the player didn't leave the area of the game. Now, I know I keep saying:
"The Player" even though Mark is the only person hat's going to play it. The truth is, as a game developer or a wannabe game developer at least, I have to look at the game I'm building as if tons of people are going to play it, just so I can predict what people might do that could potentially break the game. So if I keep saying the player, just keep in mind that I am talking about Mark. After that I decorated the interior of the building with some extra assets and, once everything was programmed in, it was time for things to get ... Spoopy!! On the beginning of the second half of
the animation, Damien goes to this void like place, and I thought that would be a really cool place to end the game, right after meeting Mark, but I wanted to do something extra. What if you went to that place, before? I had this thought of having a dark hallway with lights that turn on and the player would have to go to each light, and more importantly, stay in the light. wink wink, Allen Wake, wink wink Here is where the High Definition were in the pipeline, started getting really interesting. As to achieve this, I needed to use volumetric lights. Which fortunately, was really easy. It's just a button that says "Enable" and it just works, as long as you have fog in the scene. So this level was just a rectangular plane with a light. And after I added that first light, I added two more and of course the final two lights with the signature red and blue colors. With the Damien demon dude, in the middle with a very weird pose. Wonky, winky, wonka. One thing I actually had to do by hand, was
all of the animations for Damien demon dude. Now I'm not a 3D animator so this
was incredibly challenging, it's very, very easy, to screw up a 3D animation, if you don't know what you're doing, and yet, I actually liked all the animations I did. For a newbie, I think they turned out pretty alright. And yes, I did the animations in unity. It's probably easier on an actual 3D animation software but it worked! so for that particular scene I made the hanging, falling, and jump-scare animations and then I shove them all together in the Unity's timeline. The timeline is basically your cutscene creator. It's useful for more than just
cutscenes, but it's ... it's pretty much for cutscenes. Testing the animations was incredibly easy. But for some reason, this first animation (cutscene) had a bit of a problem. The dude, the Dame, the Damie* The Damien demon dude's face was right in the middle in the preview, but during gameplay it would always move a bit to the right, for some reason. I probably did something wrong on this first one because all the other animations ran exactly as the preview. So that's a mystery I never solved. Probably the only way to fix it would be to redo it, but again I was on a time crunch. On the hallway because I didn't want the player to move too far from the lights and risk falling from the plane, I added invisible triggers, that, if you stayed outside of them for a few seconds, the player would die and start the level over, as it played at loud scary sound... So spoopy! uuuuhhhh For some reason I thought this was smart. Why I didn't do the exact opposite? Basically making the triggers outside that you can touch, is still a mystery to me. Now that whole sequence was way too short, so I added a few more lights and even a scary bit in the middle, where one of the lights would be really far away and the player would have to run towards that light. With more scary sounds... Uuuuuhhhh In this next sequence of the animation,
Damien is Looking at a pink flower and hears someone talking. He gets really surprised but then does that: "Must be my imagination" thing and immediately goes
back to cutting wood. This works for the animation but honestly, at this point the game really needed some actual gameplay. So I would have a quick intro cutscene,
made by me, instead of using the animation as I did before, and then instead of skipping to the house, the player could actually roam around and try to find where the voices came from. And my god, this was, by far, the level where I had the most fun. If you've seen my video
where I make a game under 24 hours you know that my favorite part of game development is level design. And this level in particular, was a huge
playground for me to just have fun doing exactly that. Now it wasn't easy, by any stretch of the imagination. Simply getting the terrain as I wanted, was an absolute nightmare. Now I've almost never used the terrain tool and it definitely takes some time to get used to it. Either that or I'm just really stupid. It was either too big, or too small. My god! And that's when I broke even more from the animation. You see in the animation there are only trees. There are no rocks, no vegetation, nothing! Not even a single leaf. Aside from the pink flower, of course. However, even though this is an adaptation of that animation, making the game a hundred percent like the animation does not mean that the game would be fun. I'd much rather have a fun game, that would be a bit different from the animation instead. Because even though it worked for the animation, it doesn't necessarily means
that it will work for the game. So the level would be a big circle. I know! A level design innovator, I'm aware. So I marked the area where the play would walk around in the terrain and then I started adding props to make the actual level structure. So I started adding rocks, and foliage, and trees, and branches ... and rocks, and this is where the fun started as I try my best to guide the player as much as possible, just by using the environment. To me this is something that is just so enjoyable, I don't understand why.
Another thing I added was more things for the player to hit with his axe. I grabbed a
bunch of branches, slapped them together and that would be used as an obstacle
that would prevent the player from going forward. But if the player hit it with
his axe twice the branches would ... explode. This would be an extra way to use the
axe and it would provide some obstacle that the player would need to overcome,
adding a bit more gameplay to the whole game other than just, walking forward.
Halfway through the level, I showed it to my girlfriend because I was just so proud
of what I was doing and she said: "Oh, you could add like, a, a tree, that you
could cut down and make like a sort of a bridge" Why didn't I think of that?! However, because I didn't want to program another object that the player could cut. Remember, less than a month, I instead made a Big Boulder! This boulder would
have three of the branches attached to it and when the play destroyed all three,
it will play a quick cutscene of the boulder falling with probably the worst
sound effects ever. I couldn't find any good ones for this
one, unfortunately. This level also had the mannequin heads and a lot of people were wondering
what they were. Well... I guess you'll never know. I mean if you've got this far in
the video, I guess, I could tell you. The mannequin heads are.... Nothing! Yeah, sorry! The plan was to eventually, in other levels, add more mannequin heads,
maybe like the actual mannequin, but I never had the time to do it. And to make it worse, I added a sound effect when the player gets near them and it just made
Mark so confused! Oh... Hi...oh Well good thing I collected the weird mannequin heads. If there's like skulls in the next section, I, I'm gonna have to replay through the game. I should have just let them there, without disappearing and without any sound effects. The other big thing in this level was a jump scare and from what I read in the comments, was the jump scare that scared the most people. So, the Damien demon dude would be
standing in a hallway of rocks, twitching his head like a possessed corpse, and when the player got close... But with that, came probably, the hardest part of all. Making this level look good! With the right atmosphere. Like I said, I've never used a high definition render pipeline from unity and it has a pretty steep
learning curve, especially using the volume component. Which is basically just post-processing that makes the game will look nice. I started moving sliders
and changing numbers and nothing seemed right. I started from scratch so many
times, because it never looked as I wanted it to look. And sometimes it just looked weird. I wanted a foggy, snowy environment. It didn't work!
Especially the fog, I could not make it look right. It was either too much fog or a 2012
unity horror game. I was using such good looking assets, with the High Definition Render Pipeline. This was a game for Markiplier! I demanded it to look good! Eventually, I had a flash of inspiration. I remembered Alan Wake. Yes, Alan Wake had the answer I was looking for. You see, in Alan Wake, you have the distance fog, you know the fog that is at a distance, but you also have fog in the form of... particles. That was the missing piece! And fortunately for me the winter
environment assed pack had a beautiful fog particle included. Thank you very much! As soon as I added, that fog particle in the scene I was like: "Yup, I think I got it." And then it was just a matter of shoving a million of those in the scene, plus the snow particle also included in the pack, tweak the post-processing effects a bit more and he went from Slenderman to Damien man. As we saw before in the animation,
after that scene, Damien goes back to the house and the whole thing starts
getting a bit ... repetitive. We are in a loop! But in the animation, the cutting
down the wood from the beginning was cut off ironically. Probably because of time constraints, but because I already had that initial moment of cutting the wood done I thought I can really drive the point home, that this is a loop, by making the player redo the exact same thing. At first I thought this was a good idea, but then I imagined Marks face, replaying it, bored out of his mind, falling asleep even. So instead, I thought:
"I have the mission thing, right?" Remember? The text where the objectives appear? What if...that started freaking out?
Saying weird and creepy things. I think that will make that whole moment somewhat ... uncomfortable. And hopefully, a bit less repetitive. Celine!!! Is your text in the top corner of your head
weird? Mine's a little acting funny. But for the moment inside the house, I had
literally no idea what to do. I didn't want to make him put the firewood inside of the fire again and I didn't want to cut from the animated cutscene, to the mirror scene immediately. Fortunately, my mind was about to give me a pretty good idea. One night, I had a horrible nightmare, where I was stuck in the cabin. The cabin from the animation. And I was hearing creepy, unsettling sounds from outside the house, from inside, above me, behind me. When I woke up I thought:
"That was ... terrible" "and an absolutely brilliant idea that I'm definitely gonna put in the game!!" So that's what I did. The second time you were inside the cabin, it would turn into a scary haunted house type moment. I love doing this part, but it's
really hard to know if people are going to find it scary, because timing is super
important in horror. So I had to make sure, I spaced out the sounds enough to let anticipation build. I wasn't a hundred percent sure if Mark would find it scary, so when I was seeing the video of him playing, it made me really happy
that he was freaking out a little bit. you know what's fascinating is like... this At this point, I went back to the initial levels and, more confident in my cutscene skills, started doing the initial cutscene and the cutscene for the forest level.
I went crazy on these cutscenes trying all sorts of different angles, and shots, and changing the focus point from the camera as it moved. I never wanted to be a film director,
but I loved directing these cutscenes. However making them, took hours! Literally hours! I had to set up all the cameras and animations, activate him at the right time, make sure they were synced with the sound, I mean, I absolutely loved the process, but it was incredibly time-consuming and it was at this moment that I realized... I was in trouble! As I was making these cutscenes, I realized that it was Mark's birthday already and I wasn't even close to finishing the game. I over-scoped.
As an amateur game dev would. Not only was I missing the two final
scenes, but I was also cooking up the idea in my mind to add just just an itty-bitty tiny little thing to the game that wasn't in the animation. After the scene in the cabin and after Damien looks in the mirror, he wakes up in the middle of the woods. Damien starts hearing Celine's voice,
screaming through the trees. Damien starts running, struggling through
the snow and suddenly he is near a frozen lake. He sees a hole in the frozen
water fruit fruit prints footprints on the snow, he knows Celine is in danger and starts running towards the hole. Okay, this is all fine and dandy for the animation but as I looked at this, I immediately
thought this is not gonna work for the game. The running in the woods that's
fine, I couldn't make something similar. Now, forcing the player to go straight
ahead into the hole, without being distracted by anything around him, that
was going to be a challenge. But okay, the woods first. I wanted to create a sense of getting lost just like in the animation.
Really get the player disorient. Basically how I did this was, I placed four circle colliders and, has the player moves through the woods, it would trigger different screams from either Celine or Damien, until he reached the last one. No matter, how much he moved, he would eventually hit all four and then hit the last one, it would go to the next level. When Mark was playing, he thought he had to follow the sound. ok, actually... I have, I have turned around so much, I have no idea where... forward is. Celine!! oh, wait no, that's the point. He really didn't. Although, he did get disoriented, so
mission accomplished on that I... I guess. But that was the easy part. Making it all
look spooky and atmospheric, that was the challenge because now the approach was completely different from the other levels, since it was night-time. And just as before, it took me a while to get the exact look I was going for. When the player hit the last trigger, the screen would fade to white and would go to the next level, the frozen lake! The problem with that, like I said, is that
there was no urgency. I didn't want to give the player any chance to be wandering around lake. I wanted him to go straight forward. So I had this idea, of including the dam the Damien Demon dude the Triple D guy into the game, as an enemy. This goes ... totally, totally against the animation, but again this is a game, more importantly a horror game. Other than the void level there, was no other level in the game where the player could actually
lose. There was no threat, and the horror game
needs a threat at some point. And since I had this enemy, I decided to add him in. The structure of the level was just a hallway, basically, where I could have all sorts of prop placement fun. And I took the opportunity to add a bunch of those branch obstacles for the player to hit with his axe. Which is great because that means now that that level, would serve as a tutorial for this exact moment. In the other level, the player could learn how to overcome those obstacles at his own pace and here he would have to apply everything he learned in a more intense situation. For the enemy I made this cheesy "I'm coming for you!" pose, with a twitching head again. I don't know... Switching heads are scary, I guess. For the enemy to move around I was going to use something called Nav Mesh, which is a
path finder built-in in unity. But because, I'm an idiot, I didn't do any of that, and instead just made the path very narrow and made the enemy just go forward. And of course I made that jump scare animation,
in case he got you. This level alone, took me two extra days to make. From planning, to prop placement, making the animations, cutscene, placing the audio and triggers,
took me an extra two days. Which if you think about it, it's not that long,
considering the level, but I was already late to deliver this. But you know what?
I'm so glad I did. At this point in the game, I just wanted to make everything very
cinematic and intense. And with the running in the woods, and the chase down the hallway, I could carry it to the next level. The lake level, finally we're here. But instead of having the player just roam freely, he would have to go towards the
hole in the lake, while running away from Triple D. How I made this was, I made a hallway of rocks,
as I like to do them, apparently. Because, I made ... this is the third one by now. And I blocked off the path in the lake with invisible walls, in case the player tried to go around the lake. I made it all foggy and creepy and I realized the enemy wasn't gonna work. Because this wasn't a narrow hallway like before. So I had to hack the code that I made and made the enemy turn towards the player, completely ignoring the fact that unity has a built-in Pathfinder that would have been so much
easier to implement! But I thought it was more difficult, so I didn't, because I'm a FOOL!! Anyways... To make the player not even dream about going around the lake, I made the floor ... literally explode! And you know the faces that show up in the animation below the ice? Since I couldn't do that, for several reasons, I simply added red lights below the ice. And then I placed a bunch of triggers and,
as the player would go forward hitting those triggers, it would light up the floor and fire up the explosions. Making that last moment really... well, explosive. And of course, I made that final animation of Triple D grabbing Damien by the throat and pulling him down. As I planned before,
the last level would be the void. The exact same thing. The only difference here, is that there's
only three lights, and when the player gets to the third light, everything goes
dark and Mark appears in front of a bright lights saying the words: And the end.
The game was finally completed! And it's July 3rd! That was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most ambitious game I've done yet. It had a lot of challenges but
it was so much fun to make. And I'm honestly so proud of how it turned out and I'm so happy that Mark liked it. Of course, this is just a brief overview of the process. If I told you everything,
this would be a four hour long video. Now, Mark ended his video with some nice words to me and I want to do the same for him. Yeah, yeah listen, uh duh ... shut up! Yeah, I'm not really gonna show that, I'm
pretty sure I cried at some point during that. Regardless I'll say this... Thank you Mark! Thank you for everything! Thank you for trusting me, a complete stranger that you have never seen in your life Who lives in a foreign country far far away from you. Sincerely it, it means the world to me. It is a honor to work with you. I will be forever grateful to you and everything you've ever done for me and this is why I wanted to make this game for you. So... Thank you! And thank you guys
for watching, I hope you guys are all okay and all staying safe. I also give a special thanks to all of the members of the channel, here are all the names. Here the names.
Look at them. Thank you so much for your incredible
support. Thank you! If you'd like to become a member and help support the channel just click the "Join" button below. It's very easy. But ok... Back to making more games now. I've gathered a ton of ideas for games over these last few months mostly horror games and even a possible
do it for me sequel/spiritual successor thing. Maybe? Will see. Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching and I hope you guys enjoyed it! Take care!
