After months of severe backpain preventing me from working on my main project, I started up a new simple project that I could start in Unreal and make progress while laying down on a couch, six feet from my monitors.
This meant I could only really do things like place BSPs, meshes and lights, as well as a small amount of terrain editing. All very simple things normally, were suddenly much more clumsy. Everything took several times longer than it would normally.
The idea was pretty simple: Design a home in Unreal based off a vague idea I had using the free assets from any appropriate source. Though mostly they were from the free assets that Epic gives away on the Unreal marketplace. I had been redeeming them for years with no real idea if I was ever going to use them.
I don’t have any artistic skills so I knew I’d probably have to be creative with the placement and usage of textures, meshes and lighting. I enjoyed the process and I learned a lot. But now that I’m more healed I’ve returned to working on Project Platformer.
I’m more than happy to show off my work though! It’s not great, but I enjoyed the process.
I knew I wanted a Finnish style sauna outside, and that I wanted it to be the colour of many homes in Finland. I didn’t know the name of the colour, so I did some creative google searching to find the name and then the RGB values.
I used the experimental “Water Tool” in Unreal, which allows you to add rivers and lakes to terrains. Though, it’s experimental for a reason and it introduced a variety of issues I had to either hide or try to fix manually.
Lighting was a problem and it looked pretty weird until I switched to the early access version of Unreal Engine 5. Suddenly a bunch of lighting and performance issues were resolved.
I used the FPS template Epic provided and removed the gun from the player’s view. I kept the shooting of small yellow balls though. Because I thought it was funny.
Trees were placed using the “Foliage” tool, which made it very easy to create a nice forest. Unfortunately they have no collision.
I originally had the flower garden in the courtyard, until I remembered that we’d have cats going in there, and I didn’t want them getting sick from eating flowers, so I moved it out to the front door.
The courtyard is now a sort of safe relaxing place for both people and cats.
I also added a bunker because I had the assets and I thought it would be funny.
I kind of rushed this bit because it was only really meant as a joke.
I’m now feeling much better and I’m back to work on Project Platformer. This will be preserved here and taking up hard drive space on my backup drive, but I wont be releasing it to the public or doing any more work on it at all.
For starters, all the high quality assets have brought the package size of this over 100gigs. At least half of are files that aren’t being used, and unreal makes it difficult to remove unused files easily. Plus I have no idea how to compress it.
I also feel I’ve taken this as far as I care to take it and want to move back to my main focus now that I’m able.
But still, this served its purpose. I was able to continue making something, even if it wasn’t my best work, it was something and I learned a few lessons along the way.
Enjoy some extra screenshots I took!
Cheers,
-Alex M
