Game Studio II: Dev Blog #3

One of the most challenging weeks I’ve had recently would have to be my first week working on Part of Me. What I think made this week so difficult was a combination of my lack of experience in Unreal and this being my first time joining a team after they’ve already started working on a game.

My lack of experience in Unreal was definitely a major issue at first because I’ve been working in Unity for a few years and had gotten pretty comfortable with the tools. Any opportunity I’d had to work in Unreal in a class was either cut short or removed entirely because of Covid messing with lesson plans. I should’ve taken time to learn the engine better over the Summer or over Winter break, but I (foolishly) didn’t think it would be immediately necessary. So now I was in a situation where I needed to learn about this engine while also learning about the game itself.

Another part of the issue with getting into Unreal was that I had gotten very accustomed to using ProBuilder for level design in Unity, but we didn’t have an equivalent to that in Unreal. There was something similar available to download, but it wasn’t free and each team member who used it had to buy it on their own account, so we decided it wasn’t worth it. Especially since Part of Me is largely based around puzzles and wall jumping, the environment really matters and having a level blockout tool goes a long way. All the designers eventually came together to make some assets (which mostly ended up being done by Joe Tecce, the main level designer), so we were able to start blocking out levels, but it was a bit stressful finding out that our initial plan of finding a free blockout tool wasn’t realistic.

As far as how the process of joining the team went, I was very confused at first. I read the documentation and got a lot of information from it, but I still had questions about some details and found that I didn’t even know what specific aspects I was unsure about or how to ask about them. I basically just didn’t know where to start. Additionally, the build was a bit disorganized and I had trouble finding where everything was, so I was quite overwhelmed with all the information I was receiving and trying to access at once. Thankfully, the producers on the team really helped us with communicating our questions and concerns and I soon realized I wasn’t the only person that was confused.

With the help of the producers and other designers, many of my questions were answered by the end of the sprint and I was given ample time to go through some tutorials and experiment with Unreal. The first week was pretty rough, but I think that now, in the fourth week, I have a much better understanding of where the game is going and have been able to pitch and implement my own ideas that have pushed it forward in ways that I didn’t think would be possible at first.