Author: Mike

Inspiration and Distraction

Image by: cottonbro-studio

I’m working on a class through Udemy that is going to teach me how to make a role playing game. It looks like it will be an action adventure type RPG like Skyrim or The Witcher. For the moment I’m working on the landscaping tutorials, learning how to sculpt and erode terrain. I noticed that I can drag and drop different materials onto the panels of my landscape, but I’m a little disappointed I can’t just drag grass and detritus and stuff directly onto my brush and paint the terrain with it. The tutorial has me creating a custom landscape blueprint with six different materials from Quixel Bridge and merging them. More on that when I get through it. 

It’s been hard to find time lately since I’ve been sucked back into Elder Scrolls Online. Those who have played know what I’m talking about. This is a game my wife and I probably have a thousand hours in. ESO is the type of game I would like to learn to create.

So what happened was, we were checking out the preview videos for Starfield and lamenting about how it wasn’t on Playstation and it was not an MMO. My wife loves sci-fi games so I thought she might like to try it on PC. However, after watching one Youtube video she declared decisively: “It’s basically Mass Effect, and we can’t even play together.” So that decided it. Gaming is a family event in our house and if we can’t interact in the same world we don’t spend much time on it. Then we got to talking and comparing it to other games, and of course ESO came up and we watched a video on the Necrom DLC and the next thing you know we were questing.

So why ESO? First of all its on console, my wife, son and I all game, we all have our own PS4s and our own TVs. This setup costs way less than if we were all computer gamers. Second, its an MMO which means we can all play together and the game is massive. There is so much to do, there is something for everybody. I can be the merchant, my wife can do pvp and my son can explore and collect the flora and fauna. Most importantly, we can spend quality family time slaying monsters and bad guys together.

ESO isn’t perfect, I would like a classless progression system, flight, skyships, underwater cities and a million other things. I think of all the wonderful options the game provides and imagine what could be better. This is part of the inspiration, not only do I want to know how to create everything on ESO with Unreal Engine, I want to know how to make it bigger and better. 

Anyway, hopefully I can break away before I dump another thousand hours in and learn some more Unreal Engine.

My first completed class

My first step on improving my future career outlook was to take an Unreal Engine course on Udemy.com. It is a 10-hour course that teaches how to create a basic game involving fire damage, platforming, collecting some orbs and opening an end door.

If you are unfamiliar with Udemy you should check it out. They have classes on just about everything. Some of them seem a little overpriced or outdated but they have sales fairly often and I like that you can go at your own pace jumping back and forth as needed. The learning is better structured and the instructors seem to be more knowledgeable and the classes more organized than many YouTube videos I have tried.

I’ll start by saying that this 10 hour course actually took me closer to 30 hours. I needed to slow things down to see what the instructor was doing and go back and re-watch several portions. There were also fairly large gaps of time between some of the lectures due to my schedule and I needed to go back and refresh my mind when restarting.

One of the issues I ran into occurred when creating the timing for the moving platforms and other animations. We used a timeline node and created a cycle with keys where we input the x and y values given by the instructor. For some reason whenever I compiled and saved the timelines and went the play the game, the animations did not work. When I went back in and re-entered the keys a second time and compiled it suddenly worked. This happened every time I did a timeline, I would have to go in and redo the coordinates for it to work. I still haven’t figured out why.

The other issue is somewhat embarrassing but apparently something similar happened to a friend of mine. There is a door at the end of the level that I thought was supposed to open when I approached the collision barrier around it. Needless to say, it did not work and I spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying to figure out why. Well it turns out it had about 2 weeks of time between when I created the door and when I finally tried to use it in game. It turns out that the door was set to open when the ‘F’ key was pressed on the keyboard and I had totally forgotten until I went back through the lesson. So I am making an effort to go through classes more consistently with less of a gap between lessons. 

This class was relatively easy to follow with a good walk through of basic level editing functions and a tutorial on actors in the beginning. I feel like it improved my confidence with the software somewhat and I learned a lot of the terminology involved with Unreal Engine and basic blueprint programming.

My first game build