Hello there, thanks for coming by 
In this topic, I would like to write a little about the first game I ever created. The Test Game. I know, the title isn’t creative at all. But the game wasn’t planed to be published. It wasn’t even meant to be a game in the first place. I started up the Unreal Engine for the first time and just kept trying out new stuff… for about half a year. And now, I have this project done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAY1nL6LbvY&ab_channel=nona-me
It is available on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3102790/The_Test_Game/
Six months in development. Self-taught, with a lot of help form YouTube tutorials and numerous forums.
Based on the Unreal Engine, this first project needed almost no coding experience. Although the programming happens mostly on the visually based node system, it was very challenging to connect everything the right way. It’s difficult because as a beginner, you don’t even know which nodes exist, let alone how to connect them. Some know how in mathematics is also an advantage.
It started as a test project but became more and more serious after about two months of ‘‘testing’’ the Unreal Engine. TTG tries to achieve a low poly-comic look. I wanted to make the game funny and challenging. All 3D assets are made with Blender, a free 3D program. A few animations, like the movement of the shark, are also made in Blender, but the majority is made directly inside Unreal. All the textures are hand painted either with Photoshop, Krita, or directly on the model inside Blender. The music and sounds are from Envato Elements. A lot of them had to be edited and cut inside Audition. The voice of the NPC wife is created with Elevenlabs, an AI-generated voice software. I tried this method of AI-generated voice for the first time. It is pretty impressive and very helpful. I will use this more often in the future, especially because it makes it effortless to voice numerous characters.
After some months of developing, it began to get essential for me, to bring this project to an end. The final step was the publication on Steam. I had to rebuild some functions and made a lot of bug fixing before it got playable. But eventually, it is very satisfying to be able to show a finished project on Steam to family and friends. It definitely got me excited about developing a bigger game.
Thank you for reading! 
