More Unreal

It was another week of learning Unreal Engine. Some of the tutorials before this I was either watching or following along with in the engine. This week was working through creating a quest system step by step. It's taking quite a while. At times I've missed a mouse click and had to re-watch in order to see it. I've noticed a couple of differences in my version. There's an element that starts with one for the tutor. Mine starts with zero. Hmm, I'm going to have to go back and see I can figure it out. I also have a series of variables that aren't visible for me but are for the tutor. Hmm, I wonder why that is.

It's going to take me a while on this. Rather than posting updates that could be boring to most people, I may take a month or two off from the blog and work on it. So, if there's no blog next week, that's the reason. That would also give me time to buy and start using a book on Unreal Engine. Now that I've had a chance to watch some tutorials and work through some things in the engine, I've looked at books again but haven't chosen one. It's not easy to know which one would be the best fit, and they're too expensive to buy a pile of them.

I still don't have a way to generate landscapes. After the current tutorial, I'll probably go back to the inventory tutorial that I only watched before and follow along implementing it. That might give me enough practice to get procedurally generated landscapes working. With that I would have settings for book covers, although I don't technically need to do it that way. I could do settings by hand. It would just take a while. Doing it this way, I can also be making a game at the same time. Speaking of that, I've been writing down ideas and doing some brainstorming for quests and how the game world would work. I'm thinking that a selling point would be humorous quests. Maybe every tenth one would be funny? That would make it sort of like a movie or television show that has the occasional joke. We'll see.

Have a great weekend.

Nothing Too Significant

It was another week of banging my head on Unreal Engine. I did, however, find a good tutorial that not only was informative but would help me with doing a game. It was for making an inventory system and was that rare tutorial in which the guy explained why he was doing something and not just saying that he was doing it. The explanations were brief and clear. Despite the time it took to explain, the tutorial segments were short and to the point. I give it two thumbs up.

I was getting discouraged at my slow progress with the engine, especially after seeing a comment by someone who had been working with it for five months and still felt overwhelmed. I've used the BigWorld engine in the past and have taken programming classes. I was hoping for faster progress. Any progress is good progress, I suppose.

The main thing I've been looking at is using procedural generation to create a planet. That would give me a variety of biomes for book covers as well as being useful for a game. It appears that there are two main ways to do it. The first is to create a massive sphere. The second is to create a flat world in which a player reaching the edge of the map would transition to the other side of it in a seamless way. From the ground it would appear to be a planet. For a space game, which is what I'm leaning toward, I'd need to create planets and then create the landscapes, all using procedural generation. It's dreadfully complicated but would only need to be done one time. That's another thing I find encouraging. No matter how difficult a problem is, it only has to be solved once.

If it seems like a game is a distraction, I'm thinking of it like this. A $20 or $30 game that sold 1,000 copies would gross $20,000 or $30,000. If it sold a few thousand, that would be even better. If it was popular, I could start a company and start hiring employees.

Have a great weekend.