Tutorial: PSX-Style Pre-Rendered Backgrounds in Blender & Godot
I recently had a game idea. I have a lot of these, some of which I've been letting fester in my head for years and years, but this one was both a novel idea and realistically achievable with a single person. So of course I had to go and scope-creep the hell out of the idea.
Without making it sound too exciting the premise was a classical RPG that the player had already almost beaten, then left at the final save for many years. The game loads up at level 99 with maxed stats and all the items with a single battle left to go -- however the game has many incomprehensible systems in-and-out of battle that the player "no longer remembers" how any of them work.
The player then traverses through the game world where the story has already played out -- there's no more enemies left, the towns all have people thanking the player, all the chests are empty -- but the player needs to go and find NPCs that drop the classic game hints. "Hold select and mash square to boost" type of stuff. The last battle effectively becomes a puzzle rather than an RPG battle.
Anyways, all I needed to make this game, in theory, was some pixel art asset packs and a few weeks in Godot, but actually making games isn't my jam, I'd rather spend all my time over-complicating things. In this case, I had an itch in my brain telling me "No, you cannot make this a pixel-art game"
"It MUST be PSX-style pre-rendered 3d backgrounds"
-A bit of a pain since I've never done 3D godot and my Blender skills were already rusty back when they introduced Cycles.
I spent a bit of time tinkering, however, and after watching several unrelated youtube tutorials and making some logical leaps via forums and godot documentation, I actually managed to get pre-rendered backgrounds working.
Since there's a very real risk that I don't come back to this idea for a few weeks / months / decades, I figured it would be good to immortalize the process I ended up on in a tutorial video written for my slightly future self.
Below is the result. A 20-ish minute tutorial that starts from scratch and assembles a player walking within a pre-rendered 3d scene in Godot. I didn't realize how much I say "so" and "anyways" before making this video, but I hope it eventually helps slightly-future-me kickstart this game idea, because I think it would be really fun both to make and to eventually play!
Note: This is my first shot at making a tutorial, it's a little scatterbrained and the audio's a bit off.