Relatively Painless Games - Week 3: Jumping into Unreal

Admittedly, our team jumped into Unreal a little bit late. Truthfully, we should have been learning Unreal right off the bat since we decided early on that we were going to be going into the Unreal Engine to create this game. We made this decision for a few reasons: It's easier for our artist to work with 3D models in Unreal, it's easier on the programmer to do networking once we get to it, and it's easier on the designers from a level design perspective because we prefer the geometry of Unreal (additive and subtractive geometry allows for more complex shapes).

This week was more of a learning week for me, the other designer, and the programmer. We began work on our prototype for Junkbots, which is our game about destroying hordes of robots, collecting their parts, and augmenting yourself to become more and more powerful. And so, we developed some concepts, systems, and mechanics that would be in the prototype so that we could test what we needed to test.

After creating those documents, the other designer and I familiarized ourselves with tutorials on Unreal so that we could learn the engine and ensure that our programmer didn't have to take on all the work from the programming side and we could help when needed.

I had worked in Unreal before, however I barely touched blueprints other than moving a couple things around inside of it. I would like to get more comfortable with it, more so that I could dive into the blueprints and see what's going on and mess with it alongside our programmer if needed. I don't want to always have to rely on him to see what's happening behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, though, I couldn't get a lot of work done this week largely because of other work that I got behind on. In terms of reflection, being behind this week made me realize I that I'm back in my last year of school and I can't slack too much and let my work get behind, because not only will that effect the quality of work in those classes, but it could always hurt my work in this project. Other people are relying on what I do on this project, and so of course I don't want to hurt their work because of me slacking.