It seems a bit disingenuous to call the Unreal Engine technology my favorite technology for this project, but talking about Git would be like talking about the vegetables when you’re making steak or something. You obviously need them, but c’mon, let’s talk about the steak.
We originally debated between using Unreal or another engine called Godot, which has recently been gaining a lot of popularity. I personally like Godot a lot – it is super lightweight and new user friendly, focusing on only the bare minimum to get a game running. It has its own language called GDScript, which runs very similar to Python, and it makes a clear distinction between 2D and 3D nodes (nodes being what they refer to discrete objects / classes that can be packed together into a scene). We did eventually settle on Unreal for this project for a few key reasons.
- It’s an industry standard!
- It offers a simple visual coding language called Blueprints, which is user friendly and lessens the need for reliance on C++, a language none of us are very familiar with.
Game development has been a recent interest, and a few of us shared our interest in pursuing Unreal as an opportunity to get more accustomed to the engine and it’s workflow. It’s a little daunting – There is so much packed in the editor that it’s easy to get lost. I spent over six hours the past week just trying to make a simple room with basic textures, and ran into problems with mesh scaling (solved by something called Triplaner Projection and adjusting UV values for the mesh sample), landscaping, and file sizes! The project materials truly get massive quickly, which led to some problems pushing to Git (we were quite naïve about LFS). Better to learn now than later, right? Luckily, our growing pains handling the art aspects of the project were ended swiftly when we found a (free!!) asset pack containing basically everything we wanted.
Blueprints has also been a lot of fun to learn. Initially, I was worried about being able to do anything in C++ – I’ve never written anything in the language, and although the object oriented principles were familiar, the syntax was unfamiliar and I had no frame of reference for how to create scripted interactions in Unreal. Blueprints afforded a quick way to get into the dirt and work on functionality, and they’re built using C++ so you still get a feel for control flow and logic. Sometimes, the visual components feel like they’re a little too abstract, but I appreciate their focus on actually getting something to happen.
Part of me yearns for the greener, simpler grass of Godot (GDScript isn’t that bad, sometimes I feel like a bit of a hack piecing together a blueprint), but I am ultimately glad we stuck with Unreal. The more I work on this project, the more I feel like I have a better understanding of the flow of a game, and the more confident I feel whipping around the editor. Hopefully this thing comes out ok!
Leave a Reply