6 Months Learning Unreal Engine - My Game Dev Journey

about six months ago I began My Game Dev journey in Unreal Engine here's how it went I was up late one night perusing YouTube when I saw a video about Unreal Engine 5 and it immediately caught my attention you see I've been a software developer for a while but the amount of domain knowledge I was missing and frankly how much learning I'd have to do has always discouraged me from developing my own game but I thought with Unreal Engine I could have access to the same tools that AAA game studios were using I realized if I put in the work I could make a next-gen game from my bedroom and so I cleared some room on my SSD and began downloading I excitedly fired up unreal for the first time opened one of the starter projects and what are all these files what are all these tabs for is this code doing anything uh what does this button do okay so the lines are glowing now and finding my way around blender wasn't any easier oh a radial menu oh another radio menu this is a lot of radio menus it's a lot to take in when you're just getting started and I've had quite a few people ask me what I learned first and the advice I've found works best for me is learn what interests you the most so for me I wanted to make a cool landscape like the ones I saw in the unreal Tech demos so I followed a bunch of tutorials on how to do that then I wanted to try and recreate a game I played a while ago called chibi Robo so I followed a tutorial on how to implement basic particle effects and made a little vacuum for a robot character while attempting to fix my janky walk animations in blender I found a tutorial with the spider walk cycle and decided to make my own spider robot if you're anything like me you'll know that boredom is the biggest enemy of progress while you're learning so don't agonize over what's the right way to get started just focus on what interests you the most and if you get stuck don't be afraid to move on there's plenty of time to come back and learn this stuff and so each day I give myself a new objective and continue to watch tutorials around one month then I really started to enjoy it I was watching a bunch of devlogs at the time and decided to start sharing my learning progress on my Instagram story I posted a new clip each day documenting what I'd learned sharing my progress was something that really helped me stay motivated and it's something I would suggest to anyone else doing solo learning anyway in the process of building all these random features I actually had an idea for the first game I wanted to build I took my chibi Robo clone and combined it with the spider robot character and I really started getting excited about where I could take it each day I worked on a new aspect of the game I wanted to build I learned about the animation State machines when I was implementing wall jumping I learned about render targets when I was implementing this cleaning hose mechanism I improved my modeling skills working on this bathroom scene and I learned more about physics assets when I spent three whole days getting this sock to fall off the counter but as much as I was learning I was starting to hit a wall with the game I was making it looked cool but I was struggling to make it fun I took some time off around the holidays and had some time to reflect on the progress I'd made I was enjoying the time off with my family and really hadn't been worrying about the game that much but one night we all ended up playing this game called wavelength and I was struck by how such a simple game could keep us all entertained for hours so I spent some time brainstorming a new game concept that was more focused more replayable and most importantly simple and that's when I came up with an idea for a fast-paced downhill ski being party game AKA Mario Kart on Ice by the end of the holidays I couldn't wait to get home and start on this new project I opened up blender as soon as I got back and began working on my new project I took what I had learned about rigging from my first projects and dropped it up a really basic main character intentionally I kept this really simple since I wanted to avoid the mistakes of my first game and focus on making the game fun as soon as possible I spent a good week messing around with the skiing controls and this brings me to the next thing I learned don't be afraid of doing it the wrong way since I started on this project I have Rewritten this movement logic more than three times and looking back at this footage now the implementation is pretty awful but I really don't regret it at all because each time I learned something new that I wouldn't have learned otherwise things like what should go in the player controller versus the character class and what is the character movement component for after skiing controls were in a reasonable State I worked on an online rails camera system which came together much quicker and when I had my first play test on the demo level I'd built I had that elusive moment of wow this is actually fun continuing with my gameplay first initiative I started work on all the other things I would need for a playable demo I created a bigger course using what I'd learned about Landscapes money tutorials ago and I took some time to learn about how AI characters work so I could Implement other Racers to run test races with after that I started work on the next core feature I had been planning the items I brainstormed with my friend Nick and I made a list of items I wanted to add this was a really enjoyable part of the process since it started to make the game feel less like a skiing simulator and more like an arcade party game I also got a lot of great ideas from people on YouTube and on Discord many of which are now implemented in the game but a big hurdle I had been putting off for a while was online multiplayer and I knew it would be a lot of work and it was hard it's really been one of the most time consuming aspects of the project so far but after about two weeks and with the help of some fellow unreal developers I rewrote all my movement Logic for the third time and now I could account for real world Network conditions and had the basis of a real multiplayer experience and then it was time to start giving the game some personality I wanted to start replacing some of the placeholder art and I was nervous about it I knew roughly the style that I wanted but I thought maybe I should get a professional artist to create concept art you know like someone with one of these and maybe my characters would turn out better if I could hire some zbrush Guru to sculpt my models I delayed working on art for weeks because of this before I finally decided I should try doing it myself and I can always come back and improve on it later it turned out to be a great opportunity to level up my modeling skills and even though I've wasted countless hours on failed attempts I now have a much better understanding of what goes into creating game ready assets everything from modeling and sculpting to Rita apology and texture baking I feel pretty good about these first couple High poly models and working on the art side of things taught me my next valuable lesson which is workflow is everything often when learning something new in game development I find myself asking what's the best way to do this things like what fbx settings should I use should I use a separate program like substance painter for materials I think that the answer to these questions may vary based on the needs of the project but I've found it super valuable to spend time optimizing your workflow as it will make the whole development process much quicker for example I've put chat GPT to work writing blender scripts for me to do batch exports I've also moved on my blender unreal and other program files into the same GitHub repo so I can easily switch between working on my PC and my MacBook so what else have I been up to in the last month well first I converted a lot of my project to C plus plus which isn't something I'd say is necessary for everyone but for me I've been preferring writing code to writing blueprints so it's a change I wanted to make needless to say I've been spending a lot of time looking at this in the process of getting the new character models game ready I realized that the Animal Crossing proportions I used to model the characters were just too stubby for the skiing animations I wanted to create so I had to go back and rework the body proportions additionally I really wanted the characters to have unique proportions so I created separate skeletons for both characters and I'll be doing this in the future for all the new characters as well I also had an idea for a low budget motion capture system in which I enlisted a few unpaid interns to pretend to be skiing in my living room I then used this footage as reference to create idle animations afterwards I referenced some footage of professional skiers to create more satisfying leaning animations for turning additionally because I knew I'd like to implement a swappable clothing system I rigged all the clothing separately from the character meshes and did some custom white painting replacing all of the old character animations in the game ended up being a bit of a tangled mess and once again control rig had my head spinning But ultimately seeing the new characters skiing for the first time was really satisfying you might have noticed I also added different icons for these characters on the minimap to help distinguish them from other players but what good are different characters if you can't pick them I decided it was a good time to add some menus into the game and I started with the main menu instead of using widgets I decided to be a bit more adventurous and work on a menu screen inspired by those navigational signs you'd find out on the slopes I built another map for this in World machine and began modeling the signpost in blender around this time I discovered substance painter which sped up my texturing process a lot and I also started using a stylus for drawing and sculpting and this is what it looks like right now realistically I want to do much more with these signs and with this main menu map in general but for now it's a decent start I also added some small touches to help indicate which menu option is selected then I started on the lobby screen which had to include the ability to change characters and set the number of computer players in the match I added some simple poses for the different characters in the lobby and eventually I'd like to get more creative with these and use them to showcase the different characters personalities the whole Lobby level took me quite a while since there's a lot of busy work around hosting joining updating and deleting sessions so what you are seeing now is the first multiplayer play test of the entire flow that I ran with my friend Nick just a few days ago and so yeah it's been a pretty intense half a year or so learning unreal and there's still so much to do but I'm really enjoying it and really the comments and support on YouTube and Discord are what keep me going so thank you guys so much I'm also super excited to announce that the game is now listed on Steam under the temporary name Gumball's Downhill Racing so please do wishlist the game if you are so inclined uh it really helps a lot also consider joining the Discord if you'd like and subscribing to this channel for more videos all right thanks for watching and see you next time okay camera one rolling it's just a little bit bumpy it's just a little bit bumpy you're cruising down the hill not that bumpy your arms are swaying have you ever seen I'm okay

Channel: solomon gumball

Views: 109,897

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Id: xgdhK214TlE

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023