Hey there!
New here to this wonderful engine, yet not to the world of game development neither of 3D graphics, in which I have around 3 years of experience, doing everything, 3D graphics, rendering & lightings, animations, code scripting (I’m a software engineer), both for college exams and work.
I was doing fine with Unity for simple game projects like mobile casual/hypercasual but now I’m feeling the need to switch to UE to develop a game concept I’ve been having in mind for quite some time. It’s not at all simple and would need photorealistic environments and characters, I’d say AAA at least from a graphics/art point of view, but I would develop this alone in my freetime, as an indie. It would be a mix between a soul and survival horror. I still have in mind something to speedup the process, but do you have any general advice on how to optimize time and results? Or have you got some experience with similar projects to tell about?
Some examples of preliminary ideas I’m having without knowing UE at all:
for the human characters, I’ll probably want to use MetaHuman with retargeting, maybe with Mixamo animations;
for environment, I’m experienced with suggestive environments creation in Blender. I was thinking maybe to transfer an environment from Blender to UE, hoping textures, which are very detailed and fine-grained in Blender, would not broke the performances in the game. Is it feasible in your opinion? Or do you prefer to create envs directly in UE?
regarding monsters demons & stuff, still have to learn to sculpt human/humanoids I decided to take the hard road with learning to draw first, because I think that reconstructing a 3D shape (e.g. of human body, necessary to understand the biomechanics of monster demons & stuff) on a 2D paper forces you to gain a solid understanding of muscle, joints etc. and how they move together in 3D. It’s painful but results will start to come! Maybe I’ll buy some pre-made 3D model but I’m generally against this, because if you buy an environment done by a person with stile A, characters from B, NPC from C, what style you’ll end up with? A, B, or C or some mess between them. I’ll generally like to do everything myself, apart from sound.
Okay, hoping the question wasn’t too general and fuzzy but y’ know, I need any kind of advice from more experienced people thank you very much!
when you create video game if you have a vision off a full productyou only need cubes spheres and pyramids with a basic color palette from windows paint…only the concept of the product counts…chess checkers poker they are just a set of rules
the graphics game engine is just a tool like a hammer in the way of a blacksmith suu you have to strike the iron when it is hot
Hello @Arandomquitter, the most difficult is to think about the main mechanic of your game.
Because all game is going to be based on it, for example:
A game where the character can climb using a tool… all the environment is prepared for that…
All the skills, animations, enemies, … are going to be ready for that.
Think about Resident Evil, Alan Wake, Dead Space, Silent Hill… all are different. So tell me, what makes different your game?
Well that’s incredibly true for my background, that is casual games. In most of them, characters are just geometric shapes. Yet in general, I don’t consider this true in all the realm of games. Obviously Geometry Dash Lite is very different from Smash Hit, even though they both just use cubes pyramids etc… But I can’t think of games with a huge storytelling and a well-defined graphic style, like Miyazaki ones, as just a set of mechanics to which you add some graphics. There’s more, some videogames are more of an interactive movie experience than just some way to play with physics or randomness or whatever mechanics. Just my humble point of view!
Not at all! They have different mechanics, yes, but different stories and scripts too. Mechanics to me are jumping, attacking techniques, etc… i.e. movement and collisions. Inside a genre, it’s common to have some similarity in mechanics. As a player, when I play a FPS, what I think mostly stands out is the story and the context. That’s important at least equally as if I jump in a way or another.
My mechanics are mainly the common in survival horrors with some puzzle solving. But I think the originality resides in the story. If you tell me that all I need is a completely original and strong mechanics and all the rest is a further detail, I’ll accept it, and recognize maybe I’m biased towards storytelling and game art more than everything else
I seriously don’t know how you guessed that worms killing sexy nurse thing…
You are tempting me to reveal the concept but it’s the first original idea in my life and I promised myself to not tell it on a public forum like 2 days after hahaha
it’s going to take you 500+ hours just to develop pipeline for AAA characters. That’s 0.01% of the total work involved.
to “learn how to sculpt humanoids” is going to take several years, assuming you want to match quality with the metahumans. And sculpting individual characters is the absolute slowest way to generate characters.
This is just making static art content, and only a tiny portion of it, and already you have a couple years of effort on the plate.
I would like to make a VR MMO I took the calculator a piece of paper and did the math on what I need and how cost in $ resutat is minimim 300 milion dolar…calculating that they i gona enslave underpaid employees in a warehouse redone in office boxs!!! a mini tesla factory but with office boxs in a country where pogrammers are cheap lool…complete with a dormitory canteen all surrounded by a wall like the one that made tramp in mexico with extra barbed wire on top
How you sey may dreams are perfect example of Icarus there it flies to the sun burnsa wing falls and dies, in short if you don’t have 300 million you a Icarus best buddy
creating a game means creating a set of rules is like walking around the forest for days to find the prefect christmas tree you can have all the coolest lights and ornaments in the world but if your christmas tree is a poop tree whit 5 branches all crooked dry sitk your christmas tree will suck 100% just look at new world mmo by amazon 1,000 mans to work on it milions $ and no one of them who has ever played an mmo like letting a random acolyte fix your car at local bar
new concepts and a desire to experiment you have a concept a vision of what you want create a project make the video game without shadows light only primitive geometric mesh if something is cool and cool and that’s it like the christmas tree
Anyway,
I’m proud to have opened this topic, so that is my “solo” pipeline based on your advices, if someone else has some game concept he’d like to develop:
do the mechanics alone. I’ll avoid combat mechanics because I’ve never put my hands on it and I’d like to have complex fights. So, my main mechanics would be to move around the environment and to collect stuff into the inventory through puzzle solving.
adding combat mechanics. Thinking of mixamo for the animations, substituting other characters afterwards.
some level design and bosses.
The graphics. As someone suggested, it’d be very slow to do by myself, so maybe if I came alive into this step, I’ll buy some humanoids/monsters and for the human characters I’ll go with MetaHumans.
let’s go back to the christmas tree how much time in the forest do you have to wander to find your trea? what kind of conifer trea tipe you will use? how many meters? I don’t know what tipes off fetish conifer tipe you pick but to decorate a crismastree the tree you must have it all treaa a fetish conifer treaa redy to go it is a bit difficult to glue branches and tree slices if everything is already decorated and then if you don’t have graphics mounted and you do a poop with some BP and you’re going to do a poop like vegan restaurant based on brucell sprouts, you find a smell imidiatly with the graphic lught shiadows mounter a small poop on a BP turns into a broken sewer pipe in your room direct in the your face you drown in poop guaranteed (it’s really a pity that you can’t use light-hearted exclamation words I have to use poop)
I decided to take the hard road with learning to draw first, because I think that reconstructing a 3D shape (e.g. of human body, necessary to understand the biomechanics of monster demons & stuff) on a 2D paper forces you to gain a solid understanding of muscle, joints etc. and how they move together in 3D. It’s painful but results will start to come! Maybe I’ll buy some pre-made 3D model but I’m generally against this, because if you buy an environment done by a person with stile A, characters from B, NPC from C, what style you’ll end up with? A, B, or C or some mess between them. I’ll generally like to do everything myself, apart from sound.
thank you very much!