Tutorials 2

It was another week of going through Unreal Engine tutorials and reading documentation. Even after having used BigWorld, it's still daunting. Progress feels slower than it should be. Part of the problem is I can find a tutorial with a title that promises one thing while the tutorial delivers something different. A tutorial for creating a planet will be about creating a planet that can be seen from a distance or that can be used for staging limited screenshots rather than one that can be used as an environment. It's not always apparent that the video is a waste of time until I'm deep into it, although none of them are a complete waste of time. I still learn things.

As mentioned in a previous blog, I want to use Unreal to make book covers. I looked at free character models. The selection is limited. However, Unreal has something called Metahumans that might work. It's a way to make characters. I haven't looked at it too deeply yet because it's in early access, and I'm still struggling to get up to speed on the finer points of the engine itself. Although I've used BigWorld in the past, I wasn't an expert at it. I haven't been able to jump into Unreal and make it do the things I want it to.

I've also been struggling this week with an infection. I've been tired and not getting enough sleep. Unreal is taking too much time and effort without adequate results. I think maybe I need to focus on specific aspects of it and see how that goes, although I've kind of been doing that already. I need to figure out how to narrow my focus more, I suppose. And maybe I do need to get a book on it. I also looked at those again on Amazon.

I've been thinking about making a video game. I've brainstormed some ideas. It gets complicated fast. There's a list of features I could have or would need. Some of them give me the thought, "If I put a month into this..." It could add up to a lot of months to implement the features. The good news is that once I got a feature(system) working I could use it for other games. Before doing anything, a game would have to be designed, which means everything would have to be planned out ahead of time. How would such and such a system work? Transportation. Crafting. Harvesting. Combat. Quests. Etc. We'll see.

Have a great weekend.