I Made a Game in Unreal in 14 Days... (No Experience)

going from "I gave myself 2 weeks to make a really simple concept" to "I spent $80 on physics and weather plugins instead of implementing gameplay" is the quintessential solo game dev experience

Careful EA or Ubisoft might try and hire you as the way things are going you might be the most experienced person they have.

I am a game producer (project manager) in the video game industry for 15 years but also now learning how to do my own games on the side. I think your biggest pitfall was focusing on the look of the game before the gameplay itself. Once you have a base idea, just "Whitebox" it. No importing 3D models, animations, textures, etc... Just use the mannequins and simple shapes and focus on your core game loop. Do small iterations. This means setting a goal for the day, for example "implement simple AI enemies that will attack me". and put all your effort into that. Then assess what you have and set your next goal for the next day. Once you have your core loop and gameplay. spend time playtesting yourself, and maybe 1-2 other friends to see what can be improved. Once you have a fun game that is working, then you can focus on the UI and then the look of the game. Anyway, I wish you the best of luck and look forward to more videos!

I started into Unreal like 2 weeks ago, with the mission of making my own game and god I can relate to this video. Excited to see how you progress, and appreciate you sharing the roadblocks and solutions. The biggest lesson I’ve learnt so far is to stay focused on one aspect at a time, which is super hard when you keep finding shiny videos on how to do “cool” things in UE. I’ve now made myself just save videos and not watch them until I’m finished with what I’m working on before getting distracted 😅

"until I got distracted literally 7 seconds in and watched a 2 hour long podcast" classic.

As someone who has been developing games for nearly 5 years, my biggest bit of advice would be to focus on the core systems before anything else. Example core systems being, (attacking, taking damage, dodging, health, enemy movement, ai movement). Polish and design can always come later.

Hello Jack, I'd highly recommend creating small projects if you want to make games and keep the process fun. Take the game you're showing us now, for example. Turning that into a full game could be a 3-year journey if you already know the scope and story of the game, but realistically, we're talking about 5 years. There are many things people forget when it comes to games, but one good example is picking up items. Implementing the action of a character picking up an item is not hard, but what's difficult is getting the game to understand every situation that can happen and still perform the task correctly. What should happen if you get attacked at the same time you pick up an item? What happens if you cancel picking up the item, and so on. Try making a game that is single-based, in a close environment, and with simple mechanics. That will give you the chance to succeed but also push yourself to create more advanced projects in the future.

This is honestly very inspiring. I've played games all my life and have always wondered about making my own game but fearing that it was just writing lines of code all day. Seeing you with the same passion and going out and chasing it is awesome. Love the video!

Being a game dev over 10+ years. I would like that every single person who stated "making games is easy", "that's not working, you're just playing a game" (or any other comment understimating game developers) to watch this. It is HARD WORK to make games. I felt your struggle, same thing happen to me years ago, but over time, you will know how to save and manage your time better. Keep on going, once you get that satisfaction of seeing your game working, and other people enjoying it, is addictive.

who else is procrastinating by watching this video right now?

Man, I really really appreciate this video. I have been trying to learn game dev in the same exact way, I feel like I just watched a video of myself. Except for one key difference, you kept with it. I've hit all these different levels of frustration and given up and revisited over and over. Sometimes I get so discouraged I start thinking I'm the only one that runs into these problems and that I'm incapable. Oddly enough I found your video "Getting distracted" but it was exactly what I needed to see at this moment. I forget we all learn and experience the same difficulties and I need to power through and continue to learn. Thank you for the gentle reminder that we all struggle in the same ways but gotta push through to see progress. Thank you for your time, your humor, and your complete honesty. Great video and i'll be subscribing for more to follow you along this journey!

Not as a game developer but as a 3D artist and animator: Disappearing textures are often a result of insufficient memory allocation for textures. The defaults can quickly become full if using extremely high resolution textures and/or algorithms that combine textures (such as layering the terrain texture over the rock object texture) which often creates yet another texture file besides the ones being combined. In some cases the software will attempt to store textures, especially textures with "baked in" effects like shadows or ambient occlusion or combined layers in memory locations it can not access because it is outside of the texture cache range. What it retrieves from this inaccessible memory is all zeros resulting in pure black or sometimes pure white textures or completely transparent textures depending on how it interprets the pixel data. I don't know if Unreal provides a way to increase texture cache or not, but the other way around the issue is to reduce the resolution of the base texture files. In some software the resolution reduction is done as the file is loaded into cache so you don't need to actually alter the original file. This is an experienced guess. I know nothing about Unreal, but most 3D software use similar procedures to render an image to the screen.

As a professional game designer who has worked on AAA Games, the parts where you go "why isnt this working?!" then realize its a button press hit home lol. Keep it up man, love the video.

This is something that I can't help but admire. As someone who has tried to get back into programming and learning it only to give up after a few days, I can relate to the frustrations and glimpses of hope you get when actually managing to make something work as you imagined. I also love how you show the "mistakes" and how your attention can only hold for so long until something else grasps it away. I truly hope you continue with this and actually start producing great games, since you have a creative mindset and a vision what you are aiming towards.

I just stumbled across this video and your channel. THANK YOU for documenting this journey. It's the first time I have felt genuinely seen in the journey we all share called "Solo Game Dev with ADHD" (you mention not being diagnosed, but the constant distractions and other problems you run into are my experience to a tee). Seeing the joy on your face when you figure something out and show off what you finished with is the type of payoff that myself, and a lot of people, are striving for.

I love that you also talked about the problems that you stumbled on in game and life, not many people talk about this, and they tryna make it seem like they didn t put that effort into making something. cuz now everyone shows only the succes. and it also helps others, they can also learn from your mistakes, or simphatize with with like see that they have those problems, struggles too. it isn t just them(cuz that s how social media makes us think cuz they show only the succes). so Thank You!

The ending made me happy. A true testament to the saying “finished over perfect.” Nice job!

There's your studio name... "Just a horse games"

This was a great watch! I hope you do extremely well in this endeavor and come out of it better then ever!

Your video game concept is so great, the Viking, glowing tombstone and Valhalla end lol. Thank you for this video, I found it because I’m looking to make my own game, so thank you, it inspired me and showed me quite a lot