The clock ticked 3 AM and I still was not asleep. I spent hours lying awake and decided to make the most of the situation by just starting Wednesday. I knew myself too well I was never going to get any rest at that point anyway. So I put some time into a game I’m creating.

I never really published a 2020 resolution on Steem as most things on that list will take quite a few years. It really comes to no shock I want to do more than just play games I want to make my own.

Quite a few years ago before I even joined Steem I played around a little bit in Unity. Their tutorials back then where outdated and frankly left you frustrated every time you moved onto another step as you got an error. Which for a noobie like myself left me spending far too much time checking forums and elsewhere to discover I was in the same boat as everyone else and answers were far between. That always left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth from a couple of hours of learning experience resulted in over a week being spent to create a horribly laggy demo.

While I understand Unity from my research is supposed to better experience for someone starting at ground zero across most of the skillsets needed. I wanted to see what Unreal Engine 4 had to offer and with this massive journey that is game development. I’m sure I’ll have many start overs as I learn the better way of doing things. In the grand scheme of how long people can spend on a single game it really won’t be that long it takes me a couple of months to discover I’d rather give the other engine another try.

So far I’ve rather enjoyed Unreal Engine 4. I’ve found years-old content on it still works even with more modern-day versions of their engine which is a major plus as I have a lot of learning to do. On top of that, they have released a massive learning site with videos using their engine. Finally, they have some really in-depth demos you can download and see how they approach and solved different things. This gives me a bit of confidence knowing they have already created some decent working demos that I can go into and break down how something works the way it does.

There are going be elements that I’m not confident at all what so ever when it comes to game development. Art assets and music have never been my thing. You can also spend a whole lot of money on software and years learning just to do some basic stuff. Thankfully they have a decent selection of free and paid assets to use. Not to mention Unreal Engine 4 is also supposed to be better and rendering than Unity. So that is more the route I’m looking to take.

In 2019 I spent some time looking into and writing a few different programming languages just to see what was out there. That time spent has already paid off somewhat as I at least grasp some basic understanding that I can then use to work out what I don’t when I get lost.

Unreal Engine 4 does heavily allow the user to use what they call Blueprints. This is a way for someone without solid programming skills to be able to accomplish a lot in a little bit of time. This is something I’m all about and I’ve rather enjoyed using them so far.

That rather simple one allows when the game starts to display the UI I’ve created that contains health, mana, XP, slots for items/skills, and any other variables I may wish to add in the future on the player's screen. While it’s a bit ugly and basic I also added in all these systems this morning myself. With me building out many of those functions even further where my character can now take damage, use mana and so forth.

I also imported this morning the very character in the screenshot above which is going be one of the couple classes I want to have. I managed to tie in some of his animations and fix some things as well that I broke when attempting to get it to work. While some of the basics are also down for the mana system I still have quite a lot of work to do for creating leveling and a skill system for the different classes.

He will end up being my test subject for quite some time as I try out and expectedly fail at many different things. While this world I’ve been building around myself is done with the intent of making it a game. I have a bunch of little areas that are making some great learning experience for myself that I expect to still be used in the game.

I even put into the world quite a few monster actors and started to toy around with the AI. While they are not quite close to what I want in how they behave. This little world I’m building is starting to feel more and more alive. Even as the Sun for my Wednesday in real-life rises and I realize I have yet again put a few hours in and enjoyed learning, doing, and testing.

While I’ve also been building out a number of little areas. One of the more interesting things is just how odd a game asset looks when you are not in the role of the gamer. At first, I was a bit concerned with how flat the actual asset pieces that it has been. Then you start to really realize how big of a difference getting things like lighting is which I’ll admit I currently suck at.

At the start, it was rather easy for me to not take that into account. Game emergence is sure broken when you are the player and you can see the wall is a pixel in depth. It will surely play an interesting role in how I build out levels moving forward. My first jail cell area looks like you could just punch down the walls!

For now, I want to build things by hand when it comes to the levels. Get used to the tools, rotating, duplicating, scaling, and anything else that is needed. Along with the movement as a developer throughout the sense which thankfully did not take me to long to get used to doing. Over time as the game gets deeper and deeper, I will move away from only having handcrafted levels into procedurally generated levels. That, however, is quite the rabbit hole to be jumping down and I think will consume quite some time to get right. While I look forward to the challenge thankfully that is another day.

Next up I’m going to tackle more UI elements. I want to work on the start screen, options window, inventory, window crafting window, and a lot of things that are the basics. While I’m not going start by making all of them fully functional I can at least have a starting block from when the time comes.

As far as my plans for release hopefully one day what I’m working on will be somewhere to play. I’m not expecting this first world I’m creating to be super amazing. Quite a lot of it will end up being a playground for me to learn on. I know of a indie developer website that I will more than likely be used for publishing as I get further in and take a deeper look at things.

While it would be fun one day to release a game on the Steem blockchain with NFT items, a market place, and an online experience. I feel like I’m a million miles away until I’m to such a point. For now, I’m not going to worry myself about trying to learn and integrate stuff in for that. After learning a bunch of stuff I might focus on a simpler game that will be more manageable. Only time will tell what is the fate of this current project.

While I am externally tired from not getting much sleep today. It was at least nice this morning to knock out a couple of systems instead of spending that time trying to sleep and that not happening. It’s going to take quite a lot of random hours I find here or there to slowly learn and build this project out further. This will end up being quite the epic journey I have embarked on.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 4.