Notes

The project started in October 2022 , I already started another college (I study game development) year therefore I had to prioritize my career and from time to time,  work on this project. Also, I was in a low moment, close to deppresion so sometimes it was a little hard to continue. That said, the demo released in March 17 2023, and though the demo is literally broken everywhere, I'm proud to at least launch it, and even more, see that players enjoyed it

GENERAL POSTMORTEM

The initial goals of this project were:

• Create a game for portfolio
• Learn to use Unreal Engine, as much as I could, especially Blueprints
• Prove myself I'm capable to launch a game without any collaboration with other developers

Later, as I advanced, I noticed which parts of the game development were more fun for me, so a new goal arose

• Which part of Game Development I want to focus more from now on

About the scope, at first I wanted to develop too much, at least for one person with basic knowledge of Unreal Engine. I wanted to add the possibility of climbing certain areas or sliding in the ground, yet after downloading a package that allowed me to do this, I couldn't adapt this package to my game so I had to discard it

Same applies to the enemies. An specific enemy had a behaviour similar to the other ones, but it moved in the ceiling and I couldn't add it once again, because I lacked knowledge as well as I didn't find any solution to this without spending too much time I didn't have

GAME DESIGN & LEVEL DESIGN

The concept was pretty clear at the beginning: A Little Nightmares inspired game with creepy toys in some kind of carpentry. When I started thinking about the details I had a clear limit: DON'T DESIGN ANYTHING THAT'S NOT DOABLE. Which means, that if I wanted to add something to the game, I needed at the very least a tutorial or a reference on how to do it. Even so, I had to cut a lot of content either because of lack of time or lack of knowledge. Other than that, there wasn't any hard problem, as I already did a couple of GDD

Now, about the level design, this was my first time actually designing a level thoroughly, with its routes and best ways to exploit the mechanics. Some levels did good, but others didn't go as planned. Still, I discovered, that along with Game Design, level desing is one of the most fun parts of game development for me

BLUEPRINTS & PHYSICS

I started with little to no knowledge of how to program with blueprints, as for the past years I only programmed C# from Unity, C++ or other languages. As I advanced in the programming, as expected, it was hard to solve a lot of issues, because I didn't know all of the blueprints neither what did they do or how they worked. After some weeks, my work frow improved and I started to associate basic blueprints to basic code (like if, loops, Start, Update, switch, OnCollisionEnter...). After that, I started learning about specific blueprints not only from actors but also from level blueprints or how to access to the game manager instance.

But sometimes I reached a point, where blueprints were limiting me, as I wanted to implement some code that blueprints didn't allow me or it was too inefficient so it was a bit frustating

Physics are absolutely broken. But once again, I lacked knowledge about how physics worked in Unreal Engine. The camera was the most affected by this. Any interaction with any physical object, could move the player too fast the camera couldn't keep up with the movement, and the camera offset was displaced. Had to leave it as it is, because of time issues

ASSETS

About 3D models, animations and other assets didn't cause any problem, except a couple of textures, specifically the protagonist model which I had to improvise its texture because the original didn't apply as supposed to. And about sounds and music, I'd loved to make at least one song, but doing so would take too much time. The sound effects were... interesting. There's a level base on stealth so the intensity of the steps had to be modified depending on the movement of the player. This alone, allowed me learn a lot of blueprints, sounds, animations...

Continuing with assets, a mistake I made was downloading a lot of assets and just saving the links of the models so in the future in case I needed anything else from the model. When I had to credit all of them, it was kind of a nuisance, but necessary, as not all assets had the same conditions to use them, and for all of them I had to say whose model it was. Now apply this, when you have you game almost finished. This took a lot of time it could have been saved if I saved the credits when I downloaded them

CONCLUSION

No matter how many downloads this game have, the fact that this game allowed me learn an incredibly amount of basic knowledge not only of Unreal Engine, but more importantly what I'm capable of. Am I gonna turn this demo into a full game? Depends on how many people download the game as well as if there's anyone that could help me to fix the bugs and continue developing it

If you downloaded the game, thanks for playing and hope you had fun :D