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Dev Update – 14th September

Posted: 14 September, 2016

I've had my head in Unreal, off and on, since the last post and I'm slowly starting to make head-way. As mentioned in the previous post, the Blueprint system was feeling like a grind, so I spent a week biting the bullet and just trying to get stuff going from the C++ side. This immediately gave me better results, and despite the iteration time being slower, I ended up getting a lot more done.

To that end, I've scrapped what I've been working on - mainly little tests, but I got as far as a half functioning endless runner - and created a clean project and pushed it to Github on Monday.

I had an idea about half-way through the development of Lumo for a little mobile game where you dragged around the view of a downhill ski slope, and the character twisted and turned to follow where the terrain was going. I figured this would work well, as you could essentially play it one-handed, and maybe you could extend it a bit further to add jumps and the odd trick without complicated the controls too much. It's one of those little toy ideas that's stuck in my head ever since, so I'm going to have a crack at making something similar as my first UE4 project. I say similar, as I'm not going to do it on mobile, at least not initially. For simplicity it's probably better to start off with a PC game, and that also means I can go a little more Tony Hawks on it. The player will likely have a joypad...

Early days but I've been really impressed with UE4. The animation stuff - compared to Mecanim - is like mana from heaven. The code API is big, and more verbose than what I've been used to (C++ vs C#, natch) but it makes sense. And it works. And there's proper debugging channels. And. And.

Going to be a while until I'm properly productive as I'm only working about 1.5 days a week on gamedev atm, but it's nice to be chasing down another game. Even if it's only a small one. Screenshots soon!

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