Unreal Engine Project The First One - a dev diary

letsgethappy

Newbie
Dec 7, 2023
61
44
Status: 31-10-24: The gap betwen what i will do and what i can do makes me worry. Therefore i decided to start over with the advanced basics. That will take some time. It's a bit disappointing, but the goal remains, I'll just take a different route.

Please move on, there is currently nothing to see here!

I've been experimenting and trying things out for a while.

First of all, I learned what I didn't want to do.
Drawing for example
Firstly, I can't do it really well and secondly, I don't feel like learning it either. So it's already gone.

DAZ is nice and ok, but I don't feel like rendering for hours. Especially since I think that we really have enough 2-D games. What we don't have, or at least not enough, are real 3-D games.

Something like House Party or Real Life Sunbay.
Master of Seducion, D Sim and Modern Luxury may develop in this direction.
Please excuse me if I didn't notice a really well-made 3D game here.

Most "games" in this area are more of a showroom type.

In short: There is a lack of real 3D games and that's exactly what I want to do!

The only question is: Can I do that?

I want to be a little arrogant.
I can't remember it, but there was a time when I couldn't stand or walk on my own. And the first attempts certainly didn't give the impression that this was a path that I should continue on without hesitation. I don't know if I learned it faster or slower, but at some point I was able to do it - all of us (okay, almost all of us).

What I want to say is: If I seriously want it and try, I will be able to do it at some point.

And this is, or rather becomes, the diary of the first attempt. From the first idea to the finished product.

There's a lot of clever advice here on the subject of "how to create my first custom game" and I'll be following some of this advice.

And the most important advice of all, in my opinion: Keep it simple and just do it!

I will base myself on the LOP Gold games.

That means there are various stats, places where you can do certain things, jobs where the pay depends on your experience and, last but not least, characters you can act with.
In the first step, the focus will be on the technical implementation. So a home with a living room and bedroom and probably a bathroom. But no kitchen or terrace, we don't want to overdo it.

That means I will implement exactly that now and then continue here.

Since I have to do all of this in my free time, I ask for your patience for 3 to 4 weeks.
 
Last edited:
Mar 28, 2018
145
525
I played Real Life Sunbay and it kinda sucks you can't interact with anyone outside of a few girls (well done but limited), go to a store and buy clothes, customize your house or get a job. The game is good but it had the potential to be great. Hopefully your game and others accomplish this.
 

letsgethappy

Newbie
Dec 7, 2023
61
44
... Hopefully your game and others accomplish this.
I don´t know. This will be my first game, so I don't have any excessive expectations^^

At least i want to try to keep it simple.
It seems like my main job is making mistakes and try to fix them.
But no matter what might not go as planned, it's a very good feeling when I've found a solution that actually works
 

letsgethappy

Newbie
Dec 7, 2023
61
44
Welcome to the dark side, fellow developer
Thanks!
It's actually a lot darker than I would have imagined.
I usually look for the solution to a problem on YouTube. There are a lot of tutorials on every topic, but it takes a lot of time until I find what helps me.
Enough complaining, btw: cg to your signature. It's always been a mystery to me how you can create a game like Final Fantasy with a character like Tifa without having sex scenes
 
  • Heart
Reactions: AlternateDreams

letsgethappy

Newbie
Dec 7, 2023
61
44
05-10-24 Update 01

Yeah, some things happen, some thing are not so welll in the past 4 weeks.
I've started my game over and over again a few times now because I always manage to make a huge mess.

The biggest problem right now are the NPCs.
I haven't managed to animate this properly yet, and there's no dialog interaction in sight yet.

I have about 10 hours available, but in that time I still have to learn a lot about the engine itself.

Achieved so far:
Interaction MC, as laying in bed, go to annother level, sit somewhere.
Set stats and change them through interactions.
Creating a main menu, stats menu and similar (map for example).

Tryed but failed so far:
Create Interactions between MC and NPC
Import Characters and Environment (I can do it, but not so that i can use it properly)

Next Step:
Create the playable start of the game. that means a home and a gym.
Activities at home:
Sleeping, showering, watching TV and going to the gym, of course.
Activities at gym:
Work, train, talk to the owner and customers.
Some kind of sex with customers and the owner.

That sounds like little, but manageable.
Only when everything is working will I start replacing the characters.

Even if sometimes I'm totally frustrated because sometimes something doesn't work at all, i feel much more comfortable with the engine than when i start.

Things are moving forward. Even if it happens very slowly^^


Edit 31-10-24: The gap betwen what i will do and what i can do makes me worry. Therefore i decided to start over with the advanced basics. That will take some time. It's a bit disappointing, but the goal remains, I'll just take a different route.
 
Last edited:

FunBearDude

Newbie
Oct 30, 2024
71
61
my dream game is also a real-time 3d game that i constantly day dream about..
but once i get down to it i quickly realized that its way beyond my skill level
so i quickly pivot to an old school VN instead
still learnt a lot about UE5 and i am still using it as a render engine to save render time
now i think i will need to plan my first real 3d game to be really small and doable
and maybe add more feature to future games over time
but its going to be a long term plan, so guess i won't be able to get one out until maybe 3-5 years later
 
  • Like
Reactions: letsgethappy

letsgethappy

Newbie
Dec 7, 2023
61
44
I actually approached the matter very naively.
How complicated can it be?
And it may not be complicated, but it is very complex.
Nevertheless, I assume that I will first learn a few things and then restart again from March 2025 and have a first playable version by the end of 2025.
Plan changed, but not the goal.
Of course, I can't guarantee whether the plan will work in the end or not. But I have that goal for now.
We will see. (Hopefully^^).