Solo Game Developer Blog - Page 5 of 5 - The short journey of a solo game developer

Until July

Before July, I learned how to use the Unreal Engine. After some tutorials, I jumped into the example projects of Epic and bought some cheap/free projects from the marketplace. Since I haven’t worked in a large game company, it’s good to see how other developers structure their projects and how they realize specific gameplay features.

Then it was about time to think about what kind of game I was going to develop.

Oh, one thing, it’s a hobby project, and I don’t even know if I will charge money for it. It does not have to be successful, but of course, I want that some people are going to play it. Otherwise, there would be no point in creating a game.
Why is that important? There were 11696 games released on steam last year (https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/). To be commercially successful, I need to find the right niche, invest money and time in marketing, and do plenty of other stuff. This project should also be fun for me, and the number of couch co-op games is in an okayish range. At least small enough to have a chance that some gamer will pick it up.

So I started to write some prototypes. I created a parkour game that I didn’t enjoy playing. Then we had a “Orcs must die” like game, which was fun to make but way too close to the original. A zombie horde shooter that used the Chaos Physics engine to destroy the surroundings. I couldn’t manage to have the physics synced adequately over the network; more importantly, it was quite dull.

I stuck with the zombies because there are plenty of excellent assets in the marketplace, and the AI shouldn’t be too hard to develop.
I liked the outdoor idea of the parkour game and the shooting mechanics of the tower defense game. Furthermore, I love 3rd-Person-Shooter and enjoy it if there is a little story. So I smashed everything together and added some stealth finisher, and the game idea was born.

I looked more closely at how the unreal engine’s replication system worked and had a trial game with a friend via Steam.

Now everything was ready to set up the actual project.

Where to start UE5

For me, learning how to develop a game with UE5 with C++ was essential. I used C++ (14, 17) for quite a long time, but Unreal puts another abstraction layer on top.
I also needed to familiarize myself with Blueprints since visual scripting was new to me.
Then we also have Unreal Engine 5, which contains many practicable tools but makes it hard to keep an overview of what is available and when to use a particular feature.

I will give you an overview of tutorials I found helpful and explain why. I didn’t finish them except for the one that provides an overview of the unreal engine. I did just the parts I found helpful to me.

Unreal C++

https://www.udemy.com/course/unreal-engine-the-ultimate-shooter-course/
In this course, you are going to create a third-person shooter. You will learn how to implement basic locomotion, interactions, and AI in C++. The teacher explains everything well and has a slow pace.
It’s still using UE4, but currently, the difference is not that big. It does not provide the best coding practices and also not the best architectural design, which shouldn’t matter at this stage.

https://www.udemy.com/course/pro-unreal-engine-game-coding/
This course gives you an in-depth explanation of why certain features are used and how they are implemented. This is a good source if you want to know more about what is happening behind the curtains of UE5.

Blueprints

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2xQiFAfZRA
I picked just a random tutorial on YouTube. The one above explains it well and keeps the examples easy enough. If you can code, it’s pretty easy to pick up.

Engine Overview

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/paths/0w/beginplay
I couldn’t find the exact path I did, but this one looks like an updated version of it. It will show the big picture of the engine. You don’t have to remember everything, but you will have heard at least about almost all features and can come back to a specific one if needed.

Blueprint vs. C++

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/courses/bY/balancing-blueprint-and-c-in-game-development/LdK/introduction-to-the-course
Again, I couldn’t find the same video, but I guess this is an updated, more detailed version of it.

Overall I can recommend the learning page from Epic https://dev.epicgames.com/community/getting-started

Next Steps

The most helpful thing after that was for me to look at the provided learning projects from Epic or free-of-the-month projects from the marketplace. However, I would not recommend starting immediately with Lyra since it uses plenty of “new” concepts. Before diving into Lyra, you should understand how GAS and multithreaded animations work; otherwise, it could be a bit overwhelming.