I am undertaking the impossible-- I have no experience other than playing video games, but would like to make one of my own now. I have Unreal Engine 4 dev kit installed, but I don’t know what else I will need to get my art and stuff into the engine and build it. Hell I don’t even know how to create digital art so this is all going to be trial and error.
I want to create a top down/isometric 3rd person, melee combat focused game. The camera will not follow behind the player. Basically a dungeon crawler.
My first goal is to make and program just ONE room and get it up and running. I want to create art of my own, animate the models etc, and basically have the player, traps/objects, and some enemies in this one room all active and be able to engage in combat.
So what do I need to actually make the art/animation and then how do I feed it into UE4 and build the AI for enemies and stuff? I have a small budget so if one program will be photoshop, (I don’t know?) the open source alternative to that is Gimp?
When you hold it simple, not overcomplicating anything it’s possible.
i would suggest to focus on one part.
Creating gfx or work in the editor.
Krita, Blender, Audacity, Makehuman, Papagayo, Inkscape and many others are free and cool software.
You need no money to get your feet into dev, but time…
I would recommend starting with Blender as well, there you can make the 3d models necessary for your game. For textures you could use Krita (or Gimp or whatever you want).
You should change some settings though, unit scale in blender for UE4 export (see Blender 2 76b UE 4 10 Unit Setup - YouTube ) and probably change select with left click in the user preferences. If you get stuck you can ask questions in the Blenderartists forum (http://blenderartists.org/forum/) or the stackexchange (http://blender.stackexchange.com) after searching. Thousands of people have probably had the same issue you’re having so learn to search around and you’ll be fine. It’s probably the same with UE4. Good luck.
Gimp is ok for photos but if you would create images or paint and modify textures I would recommend Krita instead. It’s OpenSource as well.
Inkscape is good to draw vector 2D stuff (SVG). Works great if you would create for example some comic art (like it was done in Teeworlds). Blender could even export UVmaps as SVG so it’s usefull in various ways.
As others already did I even would highly recommend Blender to create 3D stuff. It’s a great tool. And it works well together with Makehuman or the new ManuelLab
Regarding sound I would even use Audacity (always fun if the neighbors think you are crazy when you walk around with your laptop to catch some samples ;)).
Regarding music you could use some free tools like Jeskola Buzz where you could even drag around and combine various nodes or use it as VST host. But there are many free music tools and hundrets of free VST plugins so it’s hard to recommend just one.
