 I think we have everyone so hi my name is Thomas Murphy and this is the first slide on the Google Slides so you can tell I put a lot of time into making the front page for this. A little bit of context about who I am my name is Thomas Murphy I gave a talk last year about Marvel and about how I quit my job and I'm making a game using Blender so context me I'm from Brooklyn I live with my life my wife Marielle Frank there she is she's awesome I have two cats ham and fish and now I have a dog named Daisy I like to add that stuff just because and I'm making a game in the Blender game engine cue the collective eye roll I'm sure everyone's gonna be thrilled to hear that that's 2.79 and not even be so I get I put a lot of stuff up on Twitter and I share everything that I'm doing and I get this comment a lot I actually I got it just before this talk started so the game the game engine's dead right it's dead right it's dead so what does that mean exactly does that mean that it's no longer working or it's no longer functioning it's no longer supported and that the developers the Blender developers have chosen not to support it for pretty good reasons it's kind of complicated to maintain there's not too many users all the a lot of users there's quite a few but you know it hasn't really gained a lot of momentum and there's a lot of other open source projects that are doing a very good job at it as well so it's it's not entirely necessary to everyone let's welcome Finn here he comes I'm calling him out so anyway the the point is it's not a unified workflow but it's there's other game engines that are doing it better but I still want to make a game entirely in Blender and I'm gonna get into those reasons so I've been given all the usual warnings you're wasting your potential if you stick with the Blender game engine a lot of times I hear FOMO a lot of people that want to get into games they think I need to get a job doing games and needs to be tied to a pipeline I need to be making money doing it so a lot of schools will say you need to use Unity or Unreal or you know insert blank here and that's because you feel you won't be validated that's another one that I really like and wouldn't you rather work with something that will give you a job skill and my personal favorite that I get quite often through DM on Twitter is lol dude you okay because a lot of people think that I'm having difficulty moving on from 2.79 I am so this is a bit of a confessional but also I love 2.8 and I actually use a lot of the tools and I'll get into that as well but first let's talk about the options there's better options these are some of the commercial options that we're all aware of they're all really cool yay they're fun some of them have better terms of service or EU LA agreements that you have to sign or agree to when you install the software but I don't want to use these I want it to be an open game there's also open-source engines and I don't want to discount the wonderful work that these do so there's spring engine Panda and Godot which are also wonderful open-source game tools but there is a level of opacity between using these tools and blender you need to import and export the options and typically when you deliver these to a customer or a user they're packed together so I'm gonna get into that later but so I'm going back and forth a lot so why should you listen to me or why are you here some of you are my friends which is great but also I come from the industry so I know a lot you can see up there and you should definitely all listen to me because I know more than you know he isn't aware of these things I didn't even fully put that in there but I'm a power user in blender and I'm very familiar with the landscape of media and the effect that it has on people and there's there's a there's something not quite right with the games industry right now so I want to make an open game and I want to use it in blender so that's kind of a half-truth and the reason is you can't open and edit the files in blender right now you can't simply in a game you can't get the files open them up and then look at them and edit things so I'm very familiar with controlling a narrative and I'm sort of trying to control the narrative in this slide but I messed up so presentation skills a hundred I definitely know what I'm doing so I'm not really a role model if you want to get a jobs in the game industry but I am making this game anyway and it's I guess you could say it's more for ethical reasons than it is necessarily for tying it to money but because I want to make an open game so I just wanted to get that other way to answer the question of what's wrong with me and why am I doing this and there you go so that's your answer and so I set to work working on a game in the blender game engine I've been working on it for over three years and rather than talk more about it I want to show the trailer because I'm a little proud of it and it's got a lot of work in it and it may not stand up to the industry you know all the shaders and all that cool stuff but I'd like to show it so I'm gonna play it oh right also game industry stopped being so suspicious right now they're the big games companies are a bit of a dumpster fire in terms of their PR and this is partially why I think because they're not making open games and there's lots of micro transactions I'll get into that moving on the trailer the press if you're playing this message there might still be time out of these wolves for the sunsets there is someone or something evil here to this world if you stay in these woods after dark choose how you leave it yeah that's that's the little trailer that I put together for it so what's really impressive and I'm really proud of is that that's an open world in the blender game engine and it's a lot of work even though it may not seem up to standards of some of the bigger games out there but yeah that's pretty much it and I want to say personal thank you to all the patreons or patrons I guess you call them patrons that support me in this project because it's an open game so I'm pretty sure that this when I release it I'm not going to be making millions but these fine people all support me and you can too if you want and I'm giving out a free poster if anyone wants so there's a there's a there's a personal plug right there but that's why I created this little title card for the company that I'm making so there it is that's the uh the intro so when you start the game you'll see that logo and it's all about making a game where everyone shares and it's a game that comes out and everyone will be able to open the files and see how they're made and all of these fine artists programmers musicians and animators have actually contributed to the game I was told it's important to make the note that I have paid all of these people to work on this so this is not some sort of free project but something I've really put a lot of myself and my money behind so there's also another way of saying thank you I make in a little animated creature tulpa for every you everyone that's helped at the game some of them are not finished yet because it takes a little bit of time to make them but sort of to digitally immortalize people that support and create content for the game they get their own little personal animal and they're all over the world so the lead programmer of here tim krelin is a tiger and lorianis is a she's from arizona and she's a scorpion it's fun having fun so I also want to say a special thank you to tim krelin the programmer who is very familiar with the blender api and gave me a real boost so I'm going to give him four mr. goobies and you can give him a follow on twitter or youtube he's great so the game how did I make the game it's a horror game and it's intentionally a horror game because you can't use too many light sources in the blender game engine you can only use like five or six so I was like okay we're gonna work in darkness sounds good other things that you have to work with uh well here this is an this is an open world this is cool so what this is using is using matrix transforms in the blender game engine and in order to make this I had to develop a special add-on that works independently also you'll be able to see the add-on if you have the game and it works with no lag which is very important so the next step here was to create the same thing but now add objects to the game so the blender game engine has another limitation you cannot add more than a few objects there's the more objects you have the slower things operate so here we're using multiple transforms again but they're all being massively shared so if there's a single user block that means that this tree is being repeatedly shared but with different scaling rotation and transforms so this is a kind of clever way and a lot of game engines do this but when I did it in the blender game engine it allows me to own it and I'd be proud of how I created it and there's full transparency you can see everything you can just open this up and play with it yourself finally this is it working with level of detail and parallax terrain block it's kind of dark right now not too many lights in this game but it's running at 60 frames per second so it's pretty fantastic the next thing I want to do was I didn't see too many compelling there's a lot of games on the blender game engine that you know they seem kind of dated but you can't make very current looking characters so I reached out to three random people on twitter and Lewis Wambel on instagram and asked them to just design a vampire just come on make one like a scary monster so these are the ones they came back with the two bookends the ones I made and the ones in the middle are made entirely by artists so I've been very agnostic in this project where I don't steer people I just it's literally feral it's like harding cats you just say make one and then I polled people and it seems that the one on the far right was the most popular so we went with that so I made a mood board that's this using some celebrities back there I don't want to call whoever that is but and then these are all just examples of texture and nasferatu and characters that would kind of you know make you think that this is what the monster would look like so I worked with Gabi Haga who's one of my one of the contributors to the game and this is she wanted to model the vampire she said she can do it and I said I believe you let's go so she did so this is actually our back and forth so she's from Mexico and you can see that she the breast starts out a little too perky and we worked backwards from there and we just had feedback so over a period of four weeks we worked on a character model you can see I'm very harsh with my criticism oh my god this is amazing oh my god this is amazing cool so you can see I really like to kick over people's sand castles here's the hand that we worked on and I said you know it's great could we put claws on it and we did so that's the rigged hand on the right over there it's a little bit of a creepy shot we worked on the face and this is when she began texturing it with substance so substance is a really wonderful tool and it's excellent but it's not open source so more on that in a minute I did a overlay on top of the face to see if it looked sufficiently spooky so I just put some blood on it and I was like yeah it looks like a spooky monster okay cool nice so I made two shaders this is the this is all in the blender game engine so this is the top layer shader and the lower shader and then there's just the mesh breakdown so you can see what it looks like and this is all this is just a screen recording so all of these are screen recordings in the blender game engine they look they look passively good I kind of like them we also did some extra work on the head to get a few more details to make it look scarier I guess and then it was a matter of making the character interactive interactive and appear and unbelievable and look good so on the left that's actually in the open world even though it's all pitch black in the background not too many lights in the blender game engine and here you can see there's head tracking so this is the testing environment for the vampire and to see if we can get her to function so this is is working and this is the player control system that tim krelin worked on as well this is her first walk in the open world and lastly you saw hair on the monster so you can't do particles in hair so I similar to unity I kind of hacked the the nodes in the blender game engine and subtracting the the y vector from the UVs of these planes and passing a cloud texture along it you get to add that back to the UVs and then that creates displacement or distortion that makes it look like hair is waving so you get some waving hair and that's how it's achieved in the blender game engine these are typical tricks that sometimes come into play also in unity and unreal they're just they're kind of locked into the engine and when a player plays it they don't have access to all these things and you can't see it so this is the final product again just her hanging out in the dark you can also see in the background that's that's missed that's a missed pass but also it's using a similar trick where it's foggy mist but it's animated but it's all tied to the same animation driver so as the the wind speed picks up so will her hair so it's kind of fun like that you can see how it works and of course oh my gosh the bugs there's so many bugs in blender game engine it's because you know it it's not fully supported and there's there's a lot of gaps so the up blender game engine is a really good answer to that and I tried using it quite a few times but there was actually quite a few gaps in it but these are two of my favorite bugs which are the jitterbug so I found out in an open world the further you get from the origin and this is the same in a lot of games you start going crazy you start just going nuts and I thought that was a really good fear mechanic it's a feature or a bug you can decide but um it's it's super weird um and I didn't know what it was happening for the longest time because you just if you're if you're approaching this as an art as an art project you don't really understand the underpinnings of game engines and all that kind of stuff so I kind of learned it organically after I finished the solve the um the jitterbug it created a new bug I call it the launch bug so when you're set back to player origin because the physics are always active without suspending dynamics you'll simply be launched for the crime of walking through the game so here's the player getting launched into space also could be fun I guess it could be like a feature of the game um again you can I'm certain that with your build of the game you could make these these bugs happen easily and that kind of leads me to the assets of the game because that's one of the biggest parts of the video game and the main reason I did it in the blender game engine I want people to be able to open it and also all most games they have um their content locked down even open source games if you want to use content that was made by somebody else and sold on like turbo squid or blender market or a stock photo these are all you can't redistribute them that means that every item in this game was made either by me or someone I paid to make it because I couldn't purchase a stock photo just a simple tree photo even because that if I launch this game and release it that's me redistributing those assets and that's a violation of the legal agreement when you purchase stock asset so it has to be kind of packaged into the software that you're using so this is an example of the tarot card deck so this is all high poly the grim reaper here he's reaching for the card deck and the conceit of the game is that you will get to face any monster you want in the game and he picks the monster from this card deck so he's high poly and all made in blender and also this is high poly and when it came time to deploy this for real time I simply bake the high poly model in the same file down to a low low poly mesh so that's the tarot card deck so it's very malleable workflow and it's entirely unified which is it's a very unique and it's only something that my game has another example and this is um this is again available in most game engines you can change object color and use vertex painting but this is directly available in blender the tool you'd be creating with ostensibly anyway so why not just keep it in blender here it is so this is me toggling the level of details on and off and also you can see the colors are fluctuating that's just the object color so based on the object color based on where you are in the game these milk crates will change color so they can be reused in the same environment without using any extra memory and it's dynamic so it's pretty cool it's a very fun workflow so again another example here is if you get really close to some of these assets you can see how they're made and they're really detailed and complicated and usually this takes a lot of time and investment so people that make independent games an individual doesn't have time to do all this so i did the crazy thing and just went ahead and took the time to do it so this is the vehicle in the game that the players will be able to drive another fun thing is the animation is built directly as well so you can see the file working file here and then the actual gameplay footage right over here and how it marries up so one of the more fun things for me is always if you ever see a game you get to see how it works behind the scenes and how it's broken a lot of people like that and games are sort of not having that anymore you can't they're getting harder to break but it's really fun to see how it's created and you could edit the animation and then save the file and then make that part of the permanent experience on your desktop so here here she is spawning from a basement so these are portals so the monster will spawn from various places in the game and this is just an example of her spawning in the game again this is also in the open world but you're downstairs so it's not as impressive this is another challenge that the blender game engine has and this also doesn't exist for most games which is the player needs to be mounted onto objects so usually with mesh deformed objects in the blender game engine they cannot be synced with solid objects that are parented to it so if there's a cube parented to an armature in the blender game engine it'll appear out of sync with the armature modifier so to get around that i worked within the constraints of the game engine which is to create two separate armatures and then mount them to each other so the armature of the arms match with the armature of the door which is also a mesh modifier so that's actually her performance but you can limit it these these these only update when you animate it it's kind of weird so here's another example the arms are interacting with the window which also has an armature that's what the black line is right at the top up there so and you can now transfer these mounting points from the player interacting with things to get caught by the vampire so there's an example whoops you got you that's the vampire that's how she gets you so um and this is the mounting system basically yeah another interaction system is when physics-based objects that don't need armatures can be interacted with this is some gameplay inside of the house and you can pick up any item thrust it toss it around to distract the monster or to use them the item so this is the inventory and the items that the player can pick up it's pretty dull i guess i'm gonna just join this but you can see the interactivity i threw some garlic on the couch that's that's cool yep you can do that so again there's just an insane amount of items in this game lots and lots of unique items from blender in the blender game engine right down there in the left corner it's called the blender riser and most of these items were either made by other artists or myself um down the bottom left hand corner you can actually see the cards that will morph in and out and these are using environmental effects tricks that are also available in the blender game engine so or unique assets like this this is just a single asset and what i committed myself to doing was the most boring assets so i went to other artists and said you wanted to make something cool and they were like yes of course so gabby haiget did the vampire um so i said um on twitter got to room in bellow he got to make the weapons which is something that a lot of people tend to like to make in 3d and no one really wants to make a microwave so this is a hotel microwave that i made is really boring and then but you know these are the things that need to get made but are very often purchased and therefore very difficult to distribute in an open game um and of course this will yield very fun results so here's actually the player and you can open the file and just kind of do weird stuff so this is just to show the versatility of the workflow and how i can open things up and look inside and you know it's creepy she might not be a vampire um moving on just another asset so you may notice that this one has texture painting on it um and i'm going to get to that in just a minute and again this is a bed made by gabby haiget so you can hide under the covers that's fun and uh here's other tricks that you can utilize so in the blender game engine this chair is bilaterally symmetrical it's the same on the left and the same on the right so i can use two uv maps with saving texture space so there's a small there's a small texture of just normals that defines the geometry and how the light bounces off and then the lighting the ambient occlusion map so these are really fun tricks that i can get away with in the blender game engine here's a few other items made by lori anis um the front door of the house um that can be massively reused throughout the level and here's some neat um flame effects it's to the simple billboard that tracks the player and um all made there's the high poly model and the low poly model next to it in the game engine there's environmental effects like fire and being burnt away and this kind of i guess glowy light you call it these are similar tricks in all game engines of course a procedural sky this was baked to a skybox but also this procedural um there's also procedural noise in this game engine as well which is actually pretty neat and not a very well known feature also procedural water so the water itself is using parallax mapping for the uh the ground and then there's distortion and here's a better shot of that so you can and simon toms helped me make this but you can simply edit this live so if you had a copy of the game you could open the file up and then play with this which is kind of fun it was just another noise shader here's a parallax shader so you can get really cool detail results so again this is me working within the constraints of the blender game engine to sort of get away with making a more visually compelling game so this is parallax there's there appears to be depth but it's a simple plane again here's more parallax the wicker the wicker pattern on the basket is just a simple low poly basket but it appears to have lots of detail because i'm taking advantage of the powerful shaders in the blender game engine this is venetian cane i guess and on some of the wicker pattern so that shows up too cool and here's the open world being used with all the parallax and all the neat stuff so this is running at 60 frames per second on my 1080 so it may it may drag on other systems but there it is here's another example of a high res texture being reused over and over again to create more detail so you can share massively textures throughout the game this is some gameplay footage of the grim reaper um dealing some cards so you can see this is an actual isolated scene in the game that also takes place in the open world and he shuffles the cards he deals the cards you pick your fate yeah there you go that's how it works so it's it's kind of like it's very neat to be able to see this and game big games don't have this they there's a there's this there's this wall between you and the interaction you'd have to there's usually an aggressive microtransaction kind of thing that would happen you'd have to purchase this or something like that but you can just jump in here and change things around you could change the picture of the monster to I don't know a picture of a cat speaking of monsters introducing Mr. Goopy so this is a door but also it's showcasing the AI stand-in so it's kind of scary to work on a game all by yourself so I made Mr. Goopy here and to test the AI in a in a horror game at night in the dark actually is pretty scary believe it or not he's kind of starts to wear you down so I made him to test this AI here's the AI functioning it's using an A star path finding algorithm it's the the standard path finding that comes in the blender game engine actually it's just right there so you can actually edit it and here you can see he's he's coming for you so the last time he sees you is the it's the little green ball if you get out of that sphere of his line of sight for more than five seconds he'll investigate and then go back to searching other points of interest so he kind of relentlessly got me there so that's kind of on a loop there but that's Mr. Goopy and he's been very helpful he's my friend because it's lonely working on a game all by yourself in a room just on alone also I've been able to exploit vehicle physics so I also inadvertently made a really kind of fun off-road game too so there you can drive a car away which is kind of the the conceit of the game again which is also wish fulfillment if you want to change any file you can if you'd like to get in a car and drive off into the interstate you can also do that so you can just get on the road and drive miles away and you can do that that's fun you can just get out of the car here's an example of me attempting and failing to distract the vampire so this is the AI testing bed with the vampire I took her textures off because he's less scary that way but I'm basically failing to distract her right now so bringing it all together this is a shot of the game this is what this is representative of the final footage there she is looking for you and I'm just gonna jump in this closet here so this very small section takes tons and tons of work and it's not like a lot of the stuff that we at blender usually tend to see which is like you're usually working with just whatever is in the frame of the camera and you got all your compositing it looks great but to make a whole game especially exclusively on the blender game engine it's very difficult and kind of mind-numbing and this is the result of years of work just to get this functioning so it's actually there's a forest outside take my word for it but it's it's a lot more work than I initially initially thought it would be but it's just on a loop now so I'm gonna change the slide so what's the plan like it's because I got making an open game that seems nuts and you're just gonna give it all away and then people can open it up and do stuff with it yep pretty much that's it that's the plan so how's it work well you could maybe buy it for me I'm probably going to put it on itch.io or gumroad and then you'll have access to the file so it'll go to your hard drive and then you can open it with blender you can also open these files with blender 2.8 no guarantee whether that will then work again with blender 2.7 because it's a different system but if you support me on patreon here you'll have the knowledge of knowing that I will be in a dark corner somewhere continually working on the game how's that work it's weird right it's because this is also kind of software as a service I know that's in the news these days or some people that are aware of games are aware of that but mine's a little different so in this example here you're walking through the open world and it's very sparse and that's because they're all massively shared assets I will be working remotely constantly just updating the information of the levels so the next time you visit this same place it could appear flush like this and that's because I'm constantly publishing and republishing using my add-on updated information so basically the game can grow and grow and get better and better and you'll be able to see its progress and track its progress while I work on it and also eventually it'll hopefully come to a state where it'll appear indistinguishable from a triple A game that's kind of the goal it's it's really ambitious and kind of might be the hill I die on but you guys can become my patrons and watch me die on that hill so here's an example of me just warping around the entire environment checking things out really quick and uh just jump over here a massive amount of assets so there's tons of them in there you may also wonder why how I could do all this even in three years there's a lot of them and while I did get a lot of help I also cheated so if anyone knows lubos project armory and armor paint I am using armor paint and that's a really good tool that I let recommend a lot of people use so armory is also a game engine and that promises a future life for my game on other devices which will be deployed to mobile mac every device basically android ios all that stuff and here's just a really quick example of being able to use armor paint which is just like substance designer except the the features are very threadbare and some of the the normal features aren't there like baking for normals are currently not available and this is just a video of me quickly going through and filling in those gaps and then I take it back into blender and I bake the normals back in blender so I'm using this now and if you are interested in learning how to do substance designer and get better I recommend you use substance paint because it will grow with you and as you learn these new features you'll have a tool that supports you and there's no expensive creative cloud membership also so definitely use armor paint I'm using it and I'm making huge gains in progress and it's much faster so here's two items that were made in substance by gabby haiga they're wonderful and here's armor paint these are also made in armor paint and this is a knife made in armor paint and here's a couch made in armor paint so normally something texturing something like in blender could take a day or two days this took me about an hour just whip it out and just model it up really quick so you can get a lot done really quickly with substance and also armor paint and here's an example of the whole scene with everything made in armor paint except for this which is obviously the comparison as is made in substance so you can see that things look of equal quality pretty much and that's great so for the future this is a very frightening version of the game this is me in the process right now of porting parts of the game over to armory so it'll be available for every system like ios and everything and it'll obviously be able to have more lights too which is great but right now it currently exists in the blender game engine as an open game also here's another example of procedural water that exists right out of the box in armor armory so i suggest getting to use armory is like a really good idea also in interest of time i think i'm done or i don't know if i am i don't know what's time is it uh 1631 i think tom ton had the wisdom of making this talk like the last talk in the salon and in the interest of giving up the um the narrative uh i'm also leaving time if anyone has any questions or if anyone wants to yell at me and tell me i'm very very wrong any questions yes i'm not doing it i'm doing it in um the question was um why am i not doing it in godot instead of and using armory and that's because again um i i want the files that are in the game to also be available to artists so people that are interested in playing games can then also edit those one of the more odious things about the gaming industry um is that there's microtransactions where a simple action a creative action is limited from the user and you will be charged five dollars to change the color of hat i feel like that's that's very limiting and kind of you know it tends to prey on people impressional children um like gambling mechanics and all that kind of stuff i don't want to date this talk by calling out individual companies but just google it you'll you'll find stuff it's fun so that's why i'm doing it um even though it may not be the greatest business model any other questions okay it's getting on here okay thank you guys very much