I thought it would be a good idea to write about my Unreal Engine game design experience in a blog. Writing the blog will hopefully help to structure my objectives, and to keep my focus on the goals. At the same time, I hope this info could be useful for the supporters of Subverse.
Prior to Subverse I had been delivering UI applications for a very long time. The feedback about my UI design work has been quite positive. Having this UI design background, moving to game design I feel is quite natural. The problem is my gaming experience stopped back in the late 90’s with Caesar III (lol). Never mind, C++ has not changed much since then.
By developing Subverse obviously I cannot rely on my Caesar III experience (even if I built quite nice aqueducts in that game). To understand how we can make Subverse a much better game I am gathering user feedback by reading suggestions, forum comments, DEV Diary comments, user requests, and watching YouTube reviews. Based on the feedback, I understand what the main issues with the game are.
I must get competent with Unreal Engine very soon. What is the best way to learn a new application development framework? In my experience the quickest way to learn new things in software development is to work on concrete tasks.
To learn Unreal Engine, I started prototyping things and creating software pieces. Please note this is my personal, engine learning R & D activity and what goes into the game depends on our new game designer.
To move forward quickly I started to create a mini dating system. This is a generic prototyping effort that connects the adult scenes with the story. The system also allows romantic interaction between the player and the waifus. Whether or not such thing should be in Subverse I would be happy to hear your opinion. I also started to create minigames. The idea is to increase your interactions with the waifus via various minigames. I am prototyping to expose this to the player via a branching dialogue. The branching dialogue I am developing is using JSON input, so we can handle complex branching dialogue scenarios. These are good use cases to get familiar with Unreal Engine C++. I am also experimenting with a generic (not Subverse specific, but a generic software module) skill tree to manage the player’s game wide progress. Would a dating system, the various mini games, branching dialogue, skills tree make Subverse a better game? Let me know please what you think. DISCLAIMER: Again, please note what I am doing now is pure R & D to learn Unreal Engine. This is NOT a roadmap for Subverse. All the above is a software development experiment. What goes into the game is a different matter.
What matters is, to transform Subverse into a very good game. I am committed to delivering software development to achieve that objective.
Thanks for your support!
Talk to you soon again.
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