Marching Ahead
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
This October I worked on my current flagship project Against Sahara, helped organize Unreal Bahrain game dev meetup which happened on 6th October, and made changes to my weekly schedule as well as my goals.
Against Sahara – Current Status
After going through 7 iterations of the game’s design, I finally ended design work and started development!.
So far I have a very ugly-looking-but-working main menu and started work on the card play framework.
I don’t have anything to show yet since it’s mostly backend work for now, but I plan on having a basic version of the game playable by next month.
Organizing Local Game Devs Pro Meetup
This proved to be a lot more time consuming than I first anticipated, but largely in part because it was my first time and was learning the ropes, although the meetup proved to be a success.
I also held a very quick talk introducing Kenney’s Asset Forge, which is a fantastic tool for quickly making art assets, especially for non-artists.
Due to the time I spent working on the meetup, I didn’t get to work on Against Sahara as much as I hoped and got a bit delayed.
Speeding-up my Pace
Last month I mentioned that I don’t feel like am progressing fast enough on my Houdini skills or the game, but to solve this I needed to look at not just my time management but also my focus.
So far my weekly schedule looked like this:
Sunday: Gym Day, which is exercise + learning about indie game business.
Monday: Study Day, where I studied Houdini.
Tuesday to Thursday: Project Work, which is mainly business activities for Z’s Laboratories and Against Sahara.
But I’m changing my schedule to this:
Sunday: Gym Day + Study Day, spend the day exercising, studying indie game business and UE4 development.
Monday to Thursday: Work, doing business activities for Z’s Laboratories and developing Against Sahara.
I’ve decided to let go of Houdini for now, and fully focus on learning the Unreal engine.
My skills in Unreal are not up to where I want them to be yet and it’s showing in my slow progress on Against Sahara, so I decided to refocus on Unreal and use my Sundays to make very small 1-day projects.
Also, Houdini and 3D modelling in general is a complex skill to learn with many sub-skills needed, and dedicating just one day a week was not enough.
On the whole, trying to learn UE4 + Houdini + Designing commercial games all at once was inefficient, which is why I’m removing Houdini from the equation for now.
I’d remove the business side of things as well and just focus on learning UE4, unfortunately my savings won’t last me forever and I do need a proper source of income within the next few months.
What’s Next: Building a Playable Version of Against Sahara + Designing a Small Custom Environment in UE4
I’ve already started working on a Halloween-themed environment that I plan on finishing next Sunday.
Development of Against Sahara is also under way and while slow am making steady progress as I wrap my head around how UE4 works.
This ends this month’s report, hope you enjoyed and if you have any feedback please comment below 🙂 .