Unreal Engine – Starting Point
The Unreal Engine and video games gave me a way to be creative. They were an escape from reality that allowed me to be a create something different and new. They always kept me interested, always reeling me in…
I wanted to build a game and I needed a good place to start. I decided to jump into using Unreal Engine. I’ve never felt more comfortable programming after 15 years of experience. I truly feel that sometimes, time, is all we need to start something amazing.
Spawn Point 1
My first thoughts were to learn the Unreal Engine. My quest to find a starting point began. I dived into the documentation, went through tons of tutorials. Building different things, making simple worlds that I could just run around in with default characters. Creating a world was fun and some way relaxing.
I wanted to learn everything the Unreal Engine had to offer. My focus was all over the place and I needed narrow my focus. Interested in getting started, I suggest starting here.
First, I would focus on what the UI would look like. Second, I would focus what platform to build this game on. In which, I picked Android. Third, I needed to learned how actors, blueprints, game state, game mode and game instance all played a part within the Unreal Engine.
Save Point 1
To begin, I d to figure out what I wanted to build. My thoughts were to build a game that gave the feeling like I was in the arcade. With that concept, it was time to focus on game design. How would it look like? What would be the objective?
The first attempt lead me to a weird style game that dealt with objects turning on and off. The AI system was based on rules on what it can and can’t do. As I started on the AI system, it lead me down a super complex path that wasn’t really what I was going for.
The second attempt actually turned to be more promising. My goal was to build a simple arcade style game that didn’t have you running, or shooting things. This was going to be a game where you can play for the High Score. The game concept would be to click as many objects as possible without running out of health.
My third attempt lead me to what I would call my first real prototype of the game. The game design was around diamonds or stars. These objects would appear and disappear and the objective is to click the stars for points based on the objective. I had to make some adjustments because the focus needed to be on scoring points instead of objectives or health.
Finally, my core game and design concept was complete. However, what’s funny is how little did I know how much more this game would change. Get started with Unreal Engine here! Next week, I’ll be going more over what I did and how I came up with other ideas in Part 2.