I think anyone who plays video games has, at one point or another, dreamt of making their OWN game.

There’s always that ONE thing you wished your favorite game did or had, right?

My friends and I have been grumbling for YEARS as we rotate through games. Looking for a multiplayer experience that we can never quite find (or even put our finger on).

This led me to finally deciding to pick up Unreal Engine 5 a few months ago.

Now, I’m not a complete noob in the arena of game design/development. Many moons ago, (like ten years – my god, I feel old) I was a fairly active member of the Skyrim/Fallout modding community and also did a handful of projects in Unity.

Screenshot from one of my first Unity projects in 2015.

Additionally, at my day job (systems engineer) I’m expected to learn many new, and often complex, systems in a relatively short amount of time – a skill I anticipate will come in handy on my game dev journey.

That said, getting started with Unreal Engine is still no easy task. It’s such a feature-rich piece of software that it becomes a double-edged sword in that its many features can quickly become overwhelming.

While looking for direction and some place to get started, I came across SmartPoly’s YouTube channel, which then led me to his Survival Game Course. I bought the course and sunk a ton of time going through the lectures and learning as much as I possibly could about the ins and outs of the engine.

The course is a great deep dive, but I started realizing that a survival game wasn’t quite what I was looking to create (despite putting a ton of time into MANY games in the survival genre). About 3/4 of the way through the course I decided to start a couple of new projects, each a different type/genre of game, and see what stuck.

For whatever reason, the one that stuck was a third-person hack-and-slash type game. The camera position and movement that I had created felt a little like Arrowhead’s 2014 Gauntlet (a game that I think is criminally underrated, as someone who spent MANY weekends in GameWorks playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy as kid).

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy arcade flyer (2000, if you couldn’t tell).

So now I’m working my way down the road of figuring out what I (realistically) could bring to this genre of game that would be new, and above all, fun.

I plan on posting regular devlogs and Unreal related articles, so keep an eye out and feel free to let me know what YOU would like to see in this type of game!