Two weeks into actual production with Unreal Engine, and things are progressing well. I am happy with our decision to switch from Unity, even though it means a little more production time as we re-make systems from scratch in C++.
The first thing I wanted to test out was getting a basic flight system implemented. Nothing fancy, just the basics. After digging around awhile, I found out that while there were a lot of tutorials on humanoid flight (like a superhero) and advanced mechanical flight (like a jet), there weren’t many tutorials out there on simple, somewhat natural, flight. Even the demo game Unreal provides has a UFO as the flying vehicle, without any natural acceleration. So, I decided to figure out a basic system myself, and make a tutorial to fill the perceived hole:
After I got that roughly working, I wanted to start on the visuals. One of Unreal’s strong points is the visual quality it allows for, out of the box. Especially this far into production, you guys deserve nicer screenshots than you’ve gotten. Over the next two weeks I’ll continue to refine them, but last week I put grass in the game. As Unreal likes to say, “It just works”. I didn’t have to do anything fancy, and the framerate is still fine. In Unity, early on in production, I had tried to do something similar, and the framerate couldn’t handle it.
And so now we move into our third week with Unreal, where we’ll be figuring out a bit more of how to do the visual style we’re going for, as well as migrating some content over, while theoretically improving it.
P.S. Join our Discord if you want to stay more involved: https://discord.gg/JEjteYe