Starting Small

Postponing de-stress project, making my first unreal engine 4 project and starting my second. In this post I reflect on April.

Every last working day of the current month I publish a report reflecting on the previous month. These reflections exist to demonstrate my progress, share my experiences and help transfer what I learn to others.

The Past Month

During April I focused on learning the basics of Unreal Engine 4, mainly the editor and Blueprints. If you read my previous reflection, you’d note I had planned to make a small mobile game that helps players de-stress.

However, after researching stress, its causes and ways to combat it and designing as small of a game as I could manage that would fulfill that purpose, I quickly realized my technical skills (especially in UE4), are not up to the task.

So, I switched strategies and focused completely on developing my technical skills by making a series of small projects, and have no intention of commercializing them.

My First UE4 Project: A Basic Room Visualization

No code, no Blueprints, no gameplay or asset making, focusing completely on learning the very basics of Unreal Engine 4, which is the level editor.

A 2-week project where I made a basic room using pre-made assets.

Things I learned from this:

How to import and place assets
How to scale, rotate and move objects
How to navigate the viewport
How to use the Place and Geometry Editing modes
How to light up the scene (using a Directional Light for the moon, a bunch of Spot Lights for the ceiling and a couple of Point Lights for the lamps)
How to do reflections
How to use the Sequencer for making the movie
How to creatively re-use assets in ways they weren’t meant to be (like the table underneath the TV, it’s actually the book shelves!)

My Second UE4 Project: A Pinball Machine Simulation

After achieving level 1 on my previous project, level 2 would be to learn to develop actual gameplay using Blueprints as well as creating custom materials.

For that purpose I’m making a Pinball machine simulation. This project is still ongoing, you can see my current progress below:

Pinball Project Day 4:
– debugging, got everything working properly again… ? ?

#DevLog #indie #gamedev #learning #ue4 #bahrain pic.twitter.com/tt46XzBCjk

— Zainab Al-Ansari ???? (@ZsLaboratories) April 29, 2018

Note: I mistakenly wrote Day 4 in the tweet, but it's actually Day 5

Writing Better Blog Posts

Beside game development, I’ve been going through the 30 Day Blog Transformation Challenge course on Udemy.

My wish is to write better, more engaging blog posts that are more useful to you.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback in this regard, and if you have any requests for content you wish to see from me, please do ask.

What’s Next

The plan for next month is to finish the Pinball Simulation project.

I haven’t decided what to do after finishing the Pinball game yet, depending on my skill level at that point, I will either get started on my first commercial game or do another learning project.

This ends this month’s report. Your comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated, so do comment below. 🙂