New Project!

Note: The word “game” in the following contexts mean vertical slices or demos made for academic or portfolio purposes.

Before I attended Full Sail University, I made a hand full of small 2D games. The process of making these games was all over the place. No real design documents or planning. Just sort of go where my imagination takes me. Which can be fun at the time but more often than not it leads to unfinished projects. At Full Sail my final project, Sid’s Adventure, was one I was extremely proud of. It was the first game I made with a set of design documents and a deadline. I had four months to go from concept to completed game. I learned a lot about planning out a project focusing on the essential features and saving time for polish at the end. After my graduation I spent a lot of time doing courses and studying various aspects of game development to prepare me for a job in the games industry. I did just about everything I could to prepare me… except for the most important aspect…

I’m finally getting back around to making games! After all the studying and courses, I’m ready to put it all into practice. This comes off the heels of me completing a 53-hour course from Udemy called “Learn Unreal Engine 5 C++ Programming” by Steven Ulibarri. It was motivating to see how everything should be done in C++. I’ve always been confused by the age-old debate of “Blueprint vs C++” and what should be done in each. This course was great in showing a good balance between defining gameplay systems with their default configurations and how you can use the editor to make small changes as needed per instance.

For my first project I’ve decided to make a 10-minute gameplay vertical slice.  I want it to be a Demons Souls clone. I know there are a lot of these out on the market, but the core focus of this project is not on what’s selling it’s what makes a good character controller. How do gameplay and movement feel. To me Demons Souls has one of the best feeling character controllers out there so it would be a great challenge to really analyze what makes that happen and what effect does changing things up do to the character. You can read the full development story on the game page here!