Experimenting, Failing, and Learning: My Road to Making Better Games

It’s been a long time since I felt that good about my game development journey. I’ve learned a bunch of new stuff in Unreal Engine and Dialogic/Godot over the last couple of weeks that keep me focused and motivated.

As I mentioned in my previous devlogs, I’m focusing on two projects to get myself accustomed to new engines and tech.

Let me give you a quick breakdown.

Rogue Shifters

I’ll start with Rogue Shifters. This project is basically a precursor in terms of learning and technology for Parallel Pulse. I want to develop a full-blown visual novel in Dialogic, creating systems close to what I’m going to need for Parallel Pulse. Initially, I wanted to mimic the exact same approach by having multiple bubbles on the same screen. It seems that making this type of setup would need a lot of code implementation, making things extremely hard for me to proceed with my game. The solution is simple, and I can pretty much do it with workarounds, having only one bubble at a time within the screen. It’s not what I wanted, but the difficulty level increases by X10 if I go with multiple bubbles. I probably shouldn’t stress myself too much about it, and I have a lot of people telling me they prefer only one bubble at a time because it’s easier to read. To my knowledge, the only engine capable of doing something like this efficiently is Ren’Py, which this year incorporated an easy bubble system.

Exploring Dialogue Bubble Presentation in Dialogic 2

In terms of assets, I have the basic poses for the two protagonists and the basic roster, but I’m missing a few important ones. It’s not clear to me how I want them to be presented visually. That being said, I’m still polishing the assets, such as upscaling, cleaning, and outlining the characters. Also, I’m missing the majority of the background images, but I don’t see this being an issue since I don’t have a lot of locations. When I wrote the script back in 2022, I wrote it with economy in mind to save on assets. I’m a little bit concerned about the animations since I’m not that familiar with tweens in Godot, but that’s why I’m making this project: an opportunity to learn the engine and familiarize myself with Dialogic. I don’t have a clear timeline for this one, but it could be ready in a few months if I focused myself in it. A rough estimation for this one is Q1 of 2026.

Project Edenfall

This is a fairly ambitious solo project since it’s the first time I’m making something as challenging as this one. It includes making 3D models, levels, a combat system, and a dialogue system in Unreal. I’m trying to build my stack in an efficient way, so that I can build my next games using this one as a base. I’m surprised how many things I’ve learned in the last couple of weeks, and what’s most important is that I encountered issues I would never have imagined, such as finding proper animations, fixing fingers, and debugging the system. This project motivates me the most right now because I always wanted to make games in Unreal Engine, especially 3D with a blend of 2d visual novel style. I don’t have a timeline for this one either, and I’m not even sure if I’ll manage to finish it: level design is my weak point and dialogue systems in Unreal Engine can be fairly complex, but similar to Rogue Shifters, this project aims to help me learn the engine to make better games in the future.

Retargeting Animations from GASP

Objectively, the biggest issue I have with this project is the lack of vision and direction. It’s not like I have a clear view of what I want to make, but I’m expanding based on what I can make and what’s possible with my current level. For example, I started experimenting with 2.5D environments to make a sidescroller only to realize this wouldn’t be possible given the lack of proper assets, let alone the complexity in terms of level design. The original idea was for the player to navigate the 2.5D levels in sidescroller mode, then have an RPG visual novel style to interact with NPCs and get missions. I decided to change it to a hack-and-slash arena game where you take on missions via a map, clear the arenas, then interact in VN style with the rest of the character roster. This seems way more intuitive and fits the tone of the game. The reason I took this turn was because creating landscapes and materials in in full were easier to make given the existing pipeline.

Conclusion (of this post)

To wrap things up, I finally feel like I’m moving in the right direction again. Both Rogue Shifters and Edenfall are teaching me different things: one helps me refine my storytelling and systems, the other pushes my technical limits in Unreal. It’s not about finishing them fast but about building the foundation I need for the games I really want to make. For the first time in a while, I feel confident that every hour I put in brings me closer to that goal.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should you juggle between multiple game dev projects?

Image
I think the majority of indie devs juggle multiple projects, and for good reason. I want to talk about whether this approach is beneficial or not. You often hear people saying you should focus on one thing at a time, but I believe that what's right for one person isn't necessarily right for another. Humans are naturally inclined towards multitasking, not in the sense of doing two things simultaneously, but in the sense of breaking up your day to work on different things. You might spend a couple of hours on one project, then switch to another for a bit, and so on. First, let’s look at the issue of starting too many projects and how it might impact your ability to actually finish a game. A common trap is starting something new, working on it for a few weeks or months, then dropping it for a shiny new idea. I’ll admit, this has happened to me occasionally, but usually for reasons not related to the allure of a new project—sometimes life just gets in the way, and you have to reduc...
Read more

Switching from Unreal Engine to Godot: Why I Made the Change

Image
  It’s been about a month since I wrote a post explaining why I chose Unreal Engine 5 to develop my game. Now, after several frustrating months of trying to overcome engine-specific barriers, I’ve made the difficult decision to switch to Godot. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit this after all the time I spent learning Unreal, but some issues with the engine, particularly with 2D development, made it impossible to continue. I want to clarify that I’ve been learning Unreal Engine for a few months, mostly for 3D game development, which Unreal excels at. There’s no doubt that for 3D, Unreal is one of the best engines out there—if not the best. However, when it comes to 2D games, the situation is entirely different. Unreal Engine has so many issues handling purely 2d games that make the engine impossible to use. Let me try and explainthe roadblocks I’ve faced over the past few months to better understand why I’ve decided to switch. Camera Bounds The biggest challenge I encounte...
Read more

Why I’m Participating in This Year’s Spooktober Jam

Image
  Before I explain why I made this decision, let me give you some context about last year’s Spooktober Jam. Participating in this jam has become a tradition for me—this will be my fourth time taking part. However, this time around, I’ll be taking on a different role. While I’ll still lead the project, I won’t be handling the programming. Since I don’t have much experience with the Godot engine, I’ll focus on what I’m best at: production and narrative design. The idea for the narrative of this game came to me last year, right after finishing our entry for the previous Spooktober Jam. I thought, “What if we did a twisted version of the classic fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, but with a humorous twist similar to  The Addams Family ?" And that's when the idea for  Cook or Be Cooked  was born. At first, I shelved the idea because I had other projects and personal matters to focus on, but the concept kept resurfacing in my mind—how the story should unfold and how the visuals...
Read more