How Hard is it to create a 3D game with a graphical fidelity level of a late ps3 game using Unity?

Hi all,

I've been sitting on this idea for a few years now, but I'm finally in a position where I'll be able to devote a good amount of time (20-30 hours) a week to develop a game. To start with, I will be trying to attempt this solo as I don't have a large "game dev" community where I am.

Instead of asking a broad question I wanted to ask a few specific questions so I can gauge if this is a good use of my time for the next 5-10 years.

My current skills/experience:

I have a masters and bachelors degree in engineering and math so coding and such should not be an issue.
I have played music for 15-20 years on two different instruments and have a good amount of experience with composition and sound design.

Things that I am worried about and my primary questions:

I am not very good at visual art - because I haven't had an opportunity to foster this skill. I want to try to create 3D models and animate them, but I'm wondering if there's any software or hardware that will be able to streamline this process for me. I.E If I want to create a human, I was wondering if there's hardware I can purchase that can mimic my facial expressions and animate them onto a human.

How long will it realistically take me to create this by myself, if I want my game to be primarily story driven with a good chunk of cutscenes and the gameplay essentially boils down to decision making and light survival.

What are the most frustrating/time consuming parts of 3D game development? I haven't been able to find clear evidence on this, but things that worry me are games that have come out from AAA developers that take 5-10 years to release (FFXV, Dishonored 2, some others in this category).

I would like the graphical fidelity of my game to be able to hold emotional depth, as I need the player to connect with the characters on a deeper level, I was originally considering 2D development, but I don't think it would fulfill my vision for the game.

Any comments or advice would be appreciated.

Thankyou!

 

Start with something small, and go from there.

 

Creating detailed 3D models is an incredible amount of work, dedicated artists take years to gain those skills. Certain methods and tools could help you, you could look into photogrammetry which allows you to basically "scan" via a series of photos, things from the real world into a 3D model but then you'll still have the task of making that 3D model usable for a game (incredible amount of polygons and geometry cleanup).

I know people in the past have used things such as the Kinect to do motion capture for animation, but this doesn't extend to facial animations. Animations are complex in general, for facial animations you need to make sure your characters face has the right topology, so that the mesh moves as expected when manipulated by the animation.

To be honest if you're just doing this project for fun then you'll learn a lot along the way, but completing a game like you describe doesn't really have any shortcuts. Considering the fact that AAA game developers are also using all techniques available to them, and they still need massive teams.

Edit: Maybe this video will interest you for face mocap (

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Thank you both for your replies!

This is the kind of information that I was looking for. I'm not expecting shortcuts or anything by the way, I don't mind if it takes a long time, I just want to make something I'm happy with. I don't do well with short projects if I'm not invested and I'm better at doing things that are more of a slow burn.

Do you have any information on the best way to buy certain assets? I don't believe most of the things in my particular game world will be unique items so I'm sure they "exist", but should I buy everything through the unity store, and are there other resources for me to explore?

I don't mind the concept of taking something that exists and modifying it a bit to suit my needs.

Thanks

 

A late PS3 era game is largely beyond 99% of small indie developers. They were fully motion captured, often had facial capture and so on.

If you mean the rendering then just use mobile post effects, Universal pipeline, and clamp texture res in importer to something like 512. Use a simple lit shader.

The tail end of PS3 is still far above small indies.

 

Yeah, a lot of people will try and discourage you from big projects but that's definitely how I learnt and it's served me well. From a hobby perspective, I think some people can learn a lot more from the journey of creating a big project that interests them than by doing small projects that do not interest them. I think the trap with big projects is that you could be focusing all of your time and energy into one aspect and not really progressing yourself in other areas, for example you could spend days working on your level design and neglecting everything else, where with a small project you would be switching between small tasks pretty quickly. But this is just something to be aware of, rather than put you off.

Unity Store obviously has a load of stuff, I couldn't comment on whether you can edit that stuff or not as I haven't used the store in a long time. If you're using Blender for your 3D work you could have a look at www.blendswap.com but you'll have to check individually with those whether you're allowed to use them or not

 

making realistic 3d art takes a lot of time. insignificant props will take a professional artist days to create.

 

PS3 had GTA 5 on it.
GTA 5 had 265 million usd budget, and took over 1000 people to develop.

The price and amount of labor wouldn't change much if they were doing it now again.

So, basically.... it is beyond capabilities of a single developer. You're looking at month or even months of works for a single character.