Eds1stGame

A metaphor for abstract art creation, with modified twin stick shooter style gameplay. Figuring out how to clear each stage is the challenge (usually seems to take about half an hour to get through the whole game for the first time). Control pad is supported but not recommended (bugs, and did most testing with keyboard and mouse).

Development:

Built to learn the basics of Unreal Engine game development and self-publishing. Made entirely in Blueprint (a major project goal was learning Blueprint). Blueprint, I found out, runs on a single-thread VM that is (probably) far less efficient (as of UE4.19.2) than those for standard interpreted programming languages (such as Java and C#), so C++ will be the backbone of future projects. Blueprint is still an awesome tool for prototyping, data, and simple event/actor management.

Made a lot of mistakes with this one; didn’t really grasp the existing gameplay framework and editor tools for structuring the project, and ended up creating my own kludgy solutions, resulting in a technical mess under the hood. My 2nd game is also going to need to be a learning project, with one of the goals being correct utilization of the Unreal gameplay framework. Another major goal is going to be physics or AI (barely touched the surface of behavior trees in the first project, and the new [as of UE4.23] Chaos Physics system just seems awesome). Multiplayer seems like an entirely different beast, and will probably be waiting at least until the 3rd or 4th game (never done any sort of network coding).

The process itself… Started building for Android, but my phone stopped talking to Windows 10 partway through development. The only workarounds I found were so clunky that I took what assets I could and rebuilt for Windows 10. Then I built systems, tested them, discarded them, and built new systems; rinse and repeat... Until finally settling on the existing gameplay elements. Effectively, probably built the entire thing at least 4 times figuring things out. The painting theme was a late-project idea. 

My approach to both design and implementation are going to be quite different for the 2nd game. Between time spent reading documentation, following tutorials and Udemy classes, and actually working on the project, it probably took 500-1000 hours (over the course of a year and a half - have to work my day job to keep eating) to get this first game.