 Yes, you read the title correctly, I am in fact going to make a game. Hello everyone, welcome to GameDevacademy, I'm Shane and this is devlog number one for my PlayStation 1 inspired horror game that I have decided I'm going to make. So I know what you're probably thinking, two questions, first of all, why horror? Second of all, why PS1 style? Well the horror question is relatively easy. I've had an idea for a game for many many years and it always seemed like it was too big of a project for me to tackle and I was just convinced if I started it I would never get it finished. And that actually leads into why I've chosen the PS1 style, it's a simpler style. With that style, which I do think really fits horror very well, I think that I will actually be able to get something made, I can do it all myself and I can take my time with it, but I'll also get results really quickly because of this more simplistic style. And I've also been inspired by a couple of other YouTube channels that I've seen doing something similar. So there is one guy called Aaron Young, I'll show you some of his work now and I think what he's doing here is really really interesting and I think he's absolutely nailing the look and feel of PS1 and that is something that I felt inspired to do as well. There's also this channel which I believe is pronounced Marseys, I do apologize if I got that wrong but you can see he's also kind of doing a PS1 style game but I think he's more picking and choosing which elements he wants to use and which elements he wants to update. Which is also something that I feel like I'm going to do for my game. I'm also going to stick links to both of these channels in the description below, absolutely check them out. If you do check them out let them know that I sent you, they don't know that I'm mentioning them in a video but they've got relatively small subscriber counts and I think their channels absolutely need a boost, they certainly deserve it so go and check them out. So as this is devlog number one then I should probably tell you what I've been up to and all the development I've done so far has just been focused around getting the PS1 look which has got a very specific look. So there are a few things that stylistically when you're looking at a game you will know that it's a PS1 game, there are just some things that it does that other systems don't. So you've obviously got the lower overall resolution but then you've got the low resolution textures with no filtering whatsoever so you get big chunky pixels. You also get a reduced color count, overall number of colors that can be displayed is lower than we would get today. There's also quite a liberal use of dithering to try and disguise the lower amount of colors. There's also the famous what I'm going to call vertex snapping effect where things just kind of wobble around and that's been covered by modern vintage gamer in one of his videos which I will link to as well and then there's also the texture warping which I believe is called affine or affine texture mapping but which is to do with the fact that PlayStation models couldn't be properly UV mapped and they just warped crazy amounts. So my first job was going through each of these effects and either trying it out or researching to see whether or not I could get these looks for myself. So the first thing to do was to get those crappy looking textures and I want to make it so that everything I do is going to be as quick as possible so rather than creating new low resolution textures from scratch I wanted to see if I could take high resolution textures import them into the engine as high resolution textures and edit them there and it turns out I can. All I need to do is turn off the texture filtering and set it so that there's no mapping and that there's it sets the maximum texture resolution that it can use so I might choose something like one to eight or two five six and that looks good. There's also the pixelated effect now in Unreal Engine 4 I knew that I could just quite easily set a resolution and it would stay at that and then I could turn off any of the anti-aliasing effects and that would have done the trick. I have struggled with that a little bit in Unreal Engine 5 because it's so good at like reconstructing a low resolution image there's actually quite a lot to turn off. So I've tackled it with a post-process effect and I think that that is going to give me the look that I want and I'm also using the same post-process material to reduce the number of colors as well. Next is that vertex snapping or jittering effect and to do that again I did a little bit of research I've been to lots of different sources and unfortunately I can't remember now where I got each bit of information from to share that with you but I did set up a master material that has this function and as you can see here with these crates side by side the one on the left doesn't jitter there's no vertex snapping but the one on the right has that applied and all of the materials in my game can have this included which means that I will quite easily be able to have that effect going on everywhere. Another thing that I could have overlooked but I think is going to be important and I think it's quite helpful in restricting the play's field of view is getting the 4x3 aspect ratio that games used to have back when I was a lad and that was quite an easy thing to do you can just go into the first person character blueprint and then you select the camera and you can just set the aspect ratio there which is what I've done and that gave me most of what I needed if you have a look in this little test level that I created I felt satisfied at this stage that I could emulate the PlayStation 1 look or as much of it as I wanted to for my game idea so then I decided that I would start mocking up my level my game world which I've decided is going to take place in a gated community of posh houses so what I've done is just kind of create the the floor so grassy areas, road areas and it's just a place hold at the moment but I knocked that up in Maya and all I've really done is subdivide the mesh because that's how PlayStation meshes were built to account for their AFine texture mapping which I might choose to implement later I haven't done that yet so I've kept the mesh so that that will work and then I've applied some different textures to it it's different materials and then I can take that into Unreal Engine and bring in my low resolution textures that have the vertex snapping and I'm good to go so here is that same mesh in Unreal Engine I think it came out alright and all that I'm doing with the textures is lowering the resolution making sure that there's no mid mapping so they kind of look a little bit crappy the further away they get and then once I've done that I brought in a very simple sphere to act as a skydome and then I got a HDR image lowered the resolution on that and drop that on there and then one of the things that I think is quite noticeable about the PlayStation 0 games is that really limited draw distance which games like Silent Hill covered with fog and I want to do that in a similar way and I've decided to go for black fog as if things are getting darker into the distance so I've added that through the use of exponential height fog and that's what it looks like here and then I can run around so I've not added a custom character yet there are no other measures but this is the beginnings of my PS1 horror game I don't want to give too much away about it yet and I'm not going to lie this is a project that may well never be finished but I have started now and I would like to share it with you so if this is something that you would like to see more of then let me know in the comment I'm going to try and keep this as a semi-regular series just as I get time and I add new features in I'll share them with you in the form of these devlog videos so I think that wraps it up for devlog number one thank you for watching thanks to all my super sexy patrons who support the channel support my work and that is so unbelievably appreciated you don't even know so thanks to you guys if anybody else would like to support me on patreon the link is in the description below and it'll be on screen at the end of the video so you can follow the link there and that's it thanks for watching and I will see you next time