I’m feeling pretty good.

I love learning new things, but for a while I think I was pretty burned out on education. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well and find a job as quickly as possible, and ironically that only made the process harder. It feels good to tinker in Unreal and learn how to build specific systems without the expectation that I finish a game or rush to a job application. I actually really enjoy the problem solving process that always felt like failure before.

I started this learning process in Unreal a few days before my first Game Dev Life Log post, so I’ve been working for maybe a week or two. Even though I’m not building a specific game, I decided that I needed to at least pick a broad genre as a direction to take my self-teaching. Plus that means I can build a bunch of systems that work together, which would loosely fit together into the basic building blocks of an actual game. I can use each system as a tech demo piece for my portfolio, and by the time I’m done maybe I’ll have an idea for an actual game to layer on top of the framework.

I ended up choosing first-person survival horror as my genre. There wasn’t a particular reason for it, but there are definitely some worthwhile benefits to that choice. Horror games can be relatively simple mechanically and still be engaging for a lot of people. There’s a reason horror is such a popular choice for indies, especially solo developers. If you can find one interesting hook for the design, often you’ll stand out pretty well even if it’s not the most technically impressive or innovative game.

Horror games also frequently use lower quality graphics and few assets, and often benefit from them. First-person games also have that benefit because you don’t have to do as much with the player character model if you don’t want to.

And even though horror games don’t have to be stuffed full of mechanics, you can cover a decent range of systems when building one, which is great for my portfolio plans. You need a player package that includes movement, environment interaction, and probably stats like health and stamina. You’ll probably want at least a simple enemy AI for a monster or killer to chase your player. You’ll probably have item pickups like keys or puzzle elements for progression. Even a properly functioning door asset is a complex system. It’s not necessary, but you can build a save system if the game is long enough for it to make sense, and there are plenty of other little extras to add if you feel like it: dynamic lighting, advanced movement options, hiding mechanics, you name it.

So this tech demo project is something that can be as simple or as complex as I want it to be. That means scope creep could become an issue, and I think my eyes are already starting to get bigger than my stomach when it comes to things I want to build. But I’m going to try to keep a lid on it. I even decided to set myself up with a Trello board like a proper dev and plan things out. We’ll see how that goes.

Conveniently, there are tons of tutorials and resources for creating horror mechanics in Unreal, since horror is such a popular genre. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of Code Things’ videos, and I feel much more confident in my Blueprints knowledge now.

My C++ learning has been slower, but I’m still improving. Gas City Games has a huge, 130+ video playlist centered on building a survival game in Unreal with C++. Part devlog, part tutorial, he explains really well what everything is for with just the right level of detail. My main struggle with C++ tutorials has been that the creators either assume that you know nothing about coding and are scared of even looking at an IDE, or otherwise that you’re a professional software developer and just want the specifics of doing it in Unreal. In my opinion GCC gives you the material in a concise, no-nonsense way that helps me a lot. He also shows all his mistakes and how he resolves them, because he believes that’s the hardest part of coding to learn, and I appreciate that.

I’ve got some resources lined up for more in-depth study on the technical side once I get comfortable working in Unreal. I know I can’t just do tutorials forever and develop much skill. But for now I’m learning and I’m having a good time.