how hard would it be to make a dark souls like game

i know its gonna be hard to do it i just want to know how much

seriously what would i need to learn in order to accomplish it?

Depends on the content you are aiming for and what skills you put into it.
A Dark Souls game could be as simple as plain text.

If you plan to recreate Dark Souls 1 by yourself… aim for 5+ years minimum working 20 hours a day every day.

lol 5 years

how long would it take to get a character moving on a white plane?

im more concerned about the parts like changing weapons and pieces of armor

can ds1 style character creation be done in unreal editor? if yes how would it be done?

You can do anything in the engine. I would certainly plan on setting aside several years for development, and even longer if you have no experience in game development, or the relevant skills necessary for a complete game, especially if you are aiming for something of similar quality or scale.

what do you mean representative gameplay? i mean you can just type dark souls on youtube right?

Anything can be made with the engine. What the other people in this thread are saying is look at the credits of Dark souls and how many people are involved and it still told years to make. So since your only one person set yourself goal to something more achievable. What parts would you like to duplicate the most, what your end goal, what gamedev skills do you already have, and how much time/money are you willing to spend. You could make simple blocks fight and kill each other in a couple days but every feature other than that is going to exponentially grow how long it takes you to learn and finish

ok then lets go step by step

first thing i need to do is to make a humanoid character that can walk on a white plane

any good tips on modeling and animating humanoid characters?

You want to learn how to model, rig, and animate, as well as designing a game? Stick with the starter content and get the basic combat working, that’s the core of the Dark Souls. Game art is entirely it’s own skill set.

You can certainly use Dark Souls as inspiration to create a working demo relatively quickly.

Here is an older video of a project I have been working on

As ZacD said - creating, rigging, and animating take a lot of time - I would try and get some assets from the Marketplace so you can focus on coding the gameplay.

really nice

but i don’t know i think making custom assets that meet my liking is part of the fun if not most of it

i have a humanoid character with a simple(bad) run animation how do i make the animations play when i want in ue4?

oh lord, good luck in here …

slowly backs out into the shadows

LOL. This is in no way meant to discourage you, but Dark souls has close to a hundred people involved in it’s creation. You would need to learn just about everything. A lot of people that get into game dev attempt to create a blockbuster at the start, and are overwhelmed, and quit. It’s not so easy. I really suggest starting small if your serious. Just create a user interface, and move to animating your characters motions. I personally am learning animations, blendspaces, etc. It’s an area im not very good with. Know that dark souls has close to over 300 swinging animations. You might want to think about creating a mocap studio just to shave a year, or two off.

If you are interested in creating art assets, one possible pipeline is to:

[Character Modeling - e.g. Hero and Enemy]
Use ZBrush 4R8 to sculpt model. 4R8 has some really great features. You can use the IMM brush stitch pieces together. ZRemesher can be used to get closer to game size poly counts.

Then use Maya LT to do your rigging and animating. Maya LT has new Quick Rig feature to generate new skeleton and bind to your mesh, as well as create an IK rig for animating. Animating is very time consuming - basically consists of posing keyframes for walking, attacking, blocking,etc…

An alternative at this point would be to use some of the excellent animations on Marketplace - e.g. Kubolds Sword and Shield Animset pro.

If your skeleton has same hierarchy and joint names, as well as same orientations, then you can import your mesh directly onto the UE Mannequin and use the animations directly, otherwise you will need to retarget your skeleton to the UE Mannequin to use them.

It’s worth mentioning that Blender is a free alternative for both modeling and animating.

[Static Meshes - Weapons and Armor]
Modeling Swords and other Gear and Armor are great chances to learn the tooling.
For modeling Hard Surfaces both ZBrush, Maya, or Blender can be used.
For texturing, Substance Painter is a great tool.

In general, you create high-poly assets.
Then retopologize to low-poly.
Then you create textures and bake maps.
Then import into UE and create materials using the textures.
Optionally, use the built-in LOD tools to create even lower poly versions to be used at farther distances from the camera.

[Environment]
You can use BSP blockout and World Aligned Materials for a quick dungeon. Nate’s MeshTool also lets you edit StaticMeshes directly in UE. And of course Maya/Blender can be used for modeling dungeon pieces.

All of this is just the art side - gameplay and programming represent a whole different set of concerns - let me know if you want more elaboration on that. For example, you will most likely utilize an AnimationBlueprint to control and blend what animations are playing.

One approach might be to sell your own Dark Souls style assets on the store - if they are good I will buy them :wink:

Hope this helped summarize
Good Luck :slight_smile:

ok you are right it might take years like that so instead lets being with something simpler

lets try to just make simple moving cube game

is there anyone in this forum who willing to teach other how to use unreal or any good tutorial list

just open the launcher, and select new project. template. Maybe top down, or third person. Thousands of good tutorials are on Youtube.

A dark souls demo? I’d say a month of non-stop work.
A whole game would take longer. It’ll be shorter if you use programmatic solutions via manually creating everything.
Use sites to get assets from like:

Fuse and Mixamo.com - free model and animations (I think)
free3d.com - other models (swords) - read the terms of each object
Freesound.org - royalty free, but pay some homage to the creators
youtube.com

I’m making one right now, that takes place it today’s time. Through programmatic solutions, I was able to get most of it done in a couple of days.
Of course, I have programmed for a long time and was using UE4 since it came out before taking this one.

im starting to think it might be a better idea to draw a comic instead at least it should be easier and take less time

Nothing in live comes easy. Work hard, work smart, and you will succeed.

If you have the money to buy all the 3D models, then isn’t that hard; you just need some experience coding RPG systems and time, time and more time to develop the code.

I have worked for Marvel Comics when I was 20~22;
Comic book production is far from “easy”… and the deadlines are completely insane; I know a guy called “Roger Cruz”, he quit Marvel’s X-Men when he was exclusive penciller, because he could sleep no more than 3 hours a day to meet the deadlines. :slight_smile:

Creating a Dark Souls game as a first project is quite complex but it can be done. You can reduce the effort and get some models, assets and stuff, then putting them together in the engine and create the logic and gameplay.

If you dedicate full time to the project and overcome the difficulties quickly you can have something playable in 3 years or less in my opinion but it depends of the level of dedication of course.

Good luck!