Exploit Agency

It’s been a long while (again) since my last update, but I’m happy to say I’ve made much better progress on my road to making my own games!

The one area I fell down is in reaching out to other people for help and advice. I don’t know why that’s so hard for me, but it is. I’m stubborn. I work through my own obstacles, always have. That’s okay sometimes, but geez, what’s the point of doing all this alone? Never mind that there’s zero chance I’d reach my long-term goals that way; working in complete isolation would be a very sad version of this story.

To correct that, I looked around for some local meet-ups. I didn’t find many, which surprised me. In fact, I found all of one I was interested in—a group of VR enthusiasts and developers—and then I missed my first meeting due to illness. The next meeting is tomorrow, and I’m intent on going. I’ll post an update ASAP.

Most of my time recently has been spent on Unreal Engine tutorials. I wanted to work through some lessons that would produce an actual, working game. There are several good video tutorials on the Unreal Engine community wiki. I chose the Infinite Runner tutorial.

I’m really happy with the results. The game you build in the tutorial is very simple, but that’s good. It allows you to go from beginning to end quickly. Seeing real progress is a great motivational tool. Also, even with the simple skills and techniques introduced in the videos, there’s a lot of room for customization and expansion.

What’s more, I actually enjoyed playing the result. I spent a lot of time (too much, really) tweaking my game after finishing the tutorial. I even considered trying to polish and rework the results into something I could share publicly, but I quickly backed off that idea. It would take too much time and effort, and this little game just isn’t where I want to spend what little time I have.

Also, I’m still too green. I’m confident I could figure out most of what I’d need, but it would take far too long. I need a lot of structure right now: focused lessons on specific topics. Once I’ve touched on enough different areas, then maybe I can think about winging it.

There were some good lessons learned here, but I’ll save the details for subsequent posts. If you’re looking for a good Unreal Engine tutorial, though, I highly recommend this series.