17th September 2019
Over September 6-8, I participated in the GameDevHQ September Game Jam. I was in the process of recovering from surgery, and hadn’t been on my PC – let alone done any game development – for the two weeks prior to the jam. That being said, I find game jams to be a great motivation to actually get a game made and out there, as otherwise projects just sit unfinished and unreleased. Because my health wasn’t […]
10th August 2019
This month I’ve delved back into using Unreal Engine. My UE4 journey began back at the start of the year, when I was keen to expand my game dev experience beyond Unity and C#. Unreal is known for being an incredibly powerful engine, and C++, alongside C#, is a much-valued language when it comes to OOP.
I began my learning by following the Unreal Engine C++ Developer course by GameDev.TV, which gave me a great overview of the engine, the Blueprints visual scripting system, and C++. However, although I created a few projects over the course of my learning, at no point did I end up with a finished, publishable game.
In May I participated in the 2019 Spring UE4 Jam, somewhat on a limb. I then spent five days creating Dungeon Defence, which I was incredibly proud of – the allowance of marketplace assets meant that I could create something that actually had a certain amount of polish. Unfortunately, I had great difficult in actually packaging and submitting my game, partially because I’d never actually packaged a game in UE4 before, and partially, it turned out, because of problems caused by some of the assets I’d used. In the end, it took me an entire week to package my game, and get it down to below 1GB so that I could actually upload it. So I missed the game jam deadline by a week.
It was an incredibly frustrating experience, both because I felt that my entry was of a good standard, and because it literally took me longer to package my game than it did to make it! After that, I took a step both from UE4 for a while, and returned to using Unity.
Jump forward to the beginning of this month, and I’ve decided to give UE4 another go. It’s harder to use than Unity, C++ is a slightly more difficult language to get your head around, and the compile times on my computer are abysmal! Still, the potential of the engine has me hooked. I’ve decided to work through a course that I’ve been looking at for quite a while now: Unreal Engine C++ The Ultimate Game Developer Course. I’ve already learnt a fair amount, and am really enjoying it.
I’m hoping to follow this up by creating an original game in UE4 – I’ve had an idea for a dungeon-themed escape room type game for a while now, and would love to implement it. Keep watching this space!
20th August 2018
Ludum Dare 42 took place just over a week ago. I’ve been on quite a roll regarding game development over the past few months, having already participated in two game jams and created a total of three games this year, so I was determined to once again get involved. The rules were a little different this time around, with the jam beginning – and ending – three hours earlier than usual, which effectively gave me […]
8th July 2018
This week I’ve been working on remaking Containment, which I created back in March 2015 for MiniLD 58. It was my first original game and also marked my first game jam entry. However, in adding all of my games to my website earlier this year, I discovered that Containment no longer ran – Unity Web Player, which the game was built for, became unsupported by modern browsers, and the project itself crashed on my computer […]
14th February 2018
Although the game I’m creating for the Unity Course Community Jam is inherently 2D in nature, having a fixed, orthographic camera, I wanted to include 3D models. My motivation for this decision is a combination of the fact that I’ve been doing a lot of work in Blender recently creating 3D models, as well as the fact that, to date, I’ve only ever released games featuring 2D drawn sprites. Thus, I felt that this change […]
4th February 2018
I’m currently participating in the Unity Course Community Jam, a 17-day-long game jam aimed at people who are taking the Complete C# Unity Developer course on Udemy. This was the course that first got me into game development around 3 years ago, and something that I’ve come back to again and again. As game jams go, it’s pretty long, and by far the longest game jam I’ve ever participated in (the previous longest being Mini […]
18th December 2017
Ludum Dare 40 took place at the beginning of the month. Having only recently really gotten back into game development, I felt in a good place to participate on my own (having collaborated with my brother during LD36 and LD39) The theme for the event was ‘The more you have, the worse it is’, so I plucked for a speed-runner-esque game where you’re gaining speed and have to avoid various obstacles on the screen. Only, […]
30th July 2017
The joy of working as a teacher and having such a long summer holiday is that I’m guaranteed to be able to participate in at least one Ludum Dare game jam each year. However, as circumstance has had it, the July/August jam is indeed the only one I’ve been able to participate in in the last year, my previous efforts being during Ludum Dare 36. As with last time, I’m once again participating with my […]
30th August 2016
Usually when I make a game I work solo, meaning that I have to do everything myself, including writing code, drawing sprites, creating animations, and recording sound effects. Working with my brother on this occasion meant that we split the work up, as, for example, we couldn’t realistically both write code at the same time. We initially tried to both have the Unity project open at the same time, with any changes syncing over the […]
30th August 2016
The Ludum Dare 36 game jam ended last night. My brother and I didn’t have a particularly productive third day, but managed to get our game to a point where we were happy with it. Main points of development on the final day were: Adding music to the game. I gave my brother the genre of ‘Ancient Greek Arcade’, and he actually managed to work with it to come up something half-decent; Adding sound effects […]