So you know them stupid farm simulators on Facebook, especially the more complex ones that add elements of community building? Stuff like Farmville, Farland, Coral Isle, etc. You basically log in every day to do busy work so you can occasionally add a new piece of scenery to your little farm or town.
Here’s the thing. Blender is free, and version 2.80 is pretty easy to use. It will export your 3D models as .fbx files.
Unity is free, and it’s pretty easy to use. If you’ve played recent versions of SimCity or The Sims, you can pick up the terrain editor pretty gorram quickly. It uses .fbx files for 3D assets.
Go get yourself a copy of each. If your computer isn’t complete garbage they’ll run pretty good. I’ve run both on my OK laptop. It isn’t junk, but it’s hardly a $2,000 gaming rig either. I think it’s an i5, ferfarksake. It sure as Hell isn’t my monster desktop rig.
Then start making little houses and wells and fences and stuff in Blender. Once you have some stuff made, export as .fbx files. After (or before, your choice) you do that, set up a blank terrain in Unity and make some hills and valleys. Paint on some ground textures so it doesn’t look like an ice cream cake. Add some water so your rivers and ponds aren’t dry, and add some trees, grass, and shrubs. The default terrain is like a kilometer square, so you have plenty of room to work with. For comparison, assuming each sprite was a meter, the entire Legend of Zelda Overworld map was like 256 meters across.
Once you have a nice looking piece of real estate, import your 3D models and start placing them. Build a little town or whatever. Whenever you get bored, come back to Blender and make some more 3D models to add to it. Want a barn, but not the barn you see in whatever game? Build it. Want a tractor instead of Dark Ages horse and plow? Build it. Want a space colony instead of a farm? Build. It. Go nuts with it. Want your town to look like Minecraft but not? Do it.
If your personal 3D modeling skills aren’t the greatest — you’ve seen what I make, so you know I’m not pretending mine are on par with Michelangelo — you can find stuff online. The Unity Asset Store has piles of free stuff available, and there are websites with 3D assets ready to import into Unity.
After a while, you’ll be able to look at your little town and get far more satisfaction from it than you ever will from playing these games, because after all is said and done, you built it with your own three hands. You didn’t waste hours and hours and days doing busywork the developers threw in to make it last longer so they could try to squeeze you for premium currency. You didn’t just mindlessly follow their script and unlock things in the order they said you could. You didn’t limit yourself to what they said you should use.
And if you come up with something or several somethings that look good, you can probably sell them on the Unity Asset Store. For that matter, I’ll bet I know at least one art-challenged game developer who would pay for good art assets.
If you decide to do this, feel free to share. Comment with a link to pictures and stuff, and I’ll be happy to give you some feedback. Who knows, maybe if I get enough people doing this I’ll build a Terrific Town Template kit with all the code you need to set up a basic town builder using your own art assets.
Note that none of this requires a shred of coding ability. You aren’t building a game, you’re building what the game pretends you’re building. But hey, if you feel like learning C# and all the weirdness that goes along with Unity, go for it.
Some technical advice:
- Pause or turn off Google Backup & Sync before you fire up Unity if you’re saving your project to a Drive folder. GBS starts screwing around in the middle of pretty much everything you do with Unity and it causes all kinds of stupid.
- Make sure you remove the camera and light from your Blender models before you export or it’s a pain in the delicate regions to do later.
- When you set up a terrain in Unity, use the flattening tool to bring ground level up to 100m or so before you start raising and lowering terrain features. You can’t go negative height, so if you want a valley or water source you have to put it on a hill if you don’t do this. Max height is 500m, so you aren’t limiting yourself too badly by doing this.