Goal 1: Make a small level just as small as a basketball court or even smaller but with AAA graphics like in the kite demo. For example a tiny but stunning mini jungle with nice plants and stuff.
Is that just as easy as throwing premade trees in and paint the bottom with some textures that you can get even for free in the market place???
Goal 2: Take the fps sample game and throw the current level out and then throw the own level from goal1 in so you can play the premade fps game in your own map.
the question is, as a total beginner how long does it take me to achieve those goals?
i try to get better hardware soon to be able to deal with the workload that is caused by heavy textures and stuff
I assume you are yong because you focus too much on getting results quickly without much effort applied.
Well, try things and see if game development is really for you; “fast results” + “game dev” = “nonono!”
If you want AAA quality visuals for goal 1, I would say several months (depending on your abilities and patience).
But ultimately I think you need to focus on goal 1, then break it down into smaller tasks and that should give you a better idea of how far away you are from succeeding. There’s a LOT to learn just in goal 1.
I would recommend that you focus on learning the engine, as well as programming before jumping into projects, that way you won’t need to ask how long something will take, you will know based on your experience. Now, obviously working on a project can help with experience, but hopefully you get my point. There is no real way for us to tell you how long anything will take you to make. There have been projects that I thought would have taken a day or two, and ended up taking over 2 weeks, and vice versa.
I won’t attempt to offer advice. I’ll just attempt to answer your questions. #1
To create a map from premade assets, you will need only the time necessary to place the assets and lights and bake the lighting. For a small map and limited expectations, this could be done in as little as an hour. This estimate does not include any time that you will have to expend learning the editor functions or the process of importing assets.
As far as AAA, that depends entirely upon your own creative talent and your ability to follow Youtube tutorials. My estimate of the added time necessary to achieve that quality is in the range of hours to days of actual project work, according to your skill and talent. This estimate does not include tutorials or look up time.
#2
To swap the map out in a fps template game is simply a matter of changing the value in the Project Settings and perhaps dropping in a Player Start Object. You would then have the fps character (arms) running around in your map. Mind the edge. You will fall off unless you have arbitrarily blocked it. You would have access to all the basic functionality of the fps template.
Download the kite demo and grab the rock assets out of that. It’s surprisingly easy to get very good results when you’ve got very good assets like these to start with. I made some rocky castle battlements out of these rock assets. Make some kind of arrangement with the rock assets and experiment with the lighting. Place several static lights around your scene and add fog etc, then do a level build - which computes all of the lighting. Play around with this for many hours and you’ll get something which will be far from AAA but you’ll be proud of.
