...Dev Log...

I've been working on an open world 3rd-person shooter. I've been working on it every day, so I figure I'll post some of the progress here!

05/20/2025

Did some more work on the placement system, I remember in college my friends all agve me shit because I would spend hours in Fallout 4 trying to painstakingly organize all my guns on a shelf. That game didn't have a placement mechanic for random crap you find in the overworld, but this one will. I love games that entail collecting stuff, and I love games that let you hoard all that stuff somewhere! ^w^

I set up a system that can tell when you're placing a tent or a pickup object, so you can deploy tents but still aslo drop them from your inventory without them just turning into full-sized tents.

Also realized Hope's vroid doesn't work nearly as well in UE5 as Pride's did, so I'll probably try to make a protagonist character next! Character creation systems are super frigging hard from what I've seen online, and there aren't really any goo assets that you can buy online to do it for you, so I think I'll have a super androngenous protagonist that you can change the outfits and hairstyles and things for. But that's for next time! :P

05/19/2025

Today I wanted to work on the camp setting up mechanic, I want to be able to place things like a tent and a camp stove and whatever else for the survival aspect when you're in the overworld. I also made little guava trees that drop guavas when you harvest them!

05/15/2025 Food and Hunger System

Today I worked on a hunger system and on interactable plants that drop food! I didn't want to hand place them because th open world I made was rather huge. And that would have sucked ass.

I also messed around w little bit with teh night and day cycle but I still haven't figured out how to make the night not quite so dark.

What I've Got so Far

When I first started out with this project I thought I could probably just buy an online template that already had all the programming done and just write a story that would fit into it. LOL! that didn't even almost work.

I think over the course of the last year and a bit of teh year before that I've spent probably more than 1000 dollars on Unreal Engin assets. I thought I could daisy-chain a bunch together and get all the features I wanted by getting all teh UE5 assets to play nice.

UE5 assets do not play nice with each other.

You can get small assets like a day-and-night cycle to work together with other things, but if you get a whole-ass game template you're pretty much trapped in whatever that template lets you do. It took me a full year and three templates to figure that out and fully accept it.

I've cut a ton of features that I thought I was going to put in the game, like I thought it was going to be an open world VR game with realistic weapon mechanics and all that. I basically anted to make soimething on teh level of Into the Radius.

I'm a script kitty there's no way in hell I can manage something like that. YET.

But after months and months of failures, and restarts, and a full-ass hard drive of do-overs and abandoned drafts of various projects, I realized I was actually starting to understand what I was doing. It's been a hot minute since I've taken any sort of formal computer programming class, and UE5's Blueprints language doesn't resemble anyhting I went to school for, but as it turns out, you really can't do something every single day without getting at least a little better at it.

So instead of a 400 dollar template I switched to 9 dollar Inventory and Quest system and decided I would just make everything else myself. And honestly, that's been going a lot better.

If you decide you want to make a video game as a total amatuer, I'd highly recomend going through the youtube tutorials instead of trying to get a bunch of the assets off the marketplace and frankenstiening them together.

Sorry I really like talking.

ANYWAY. I've got some parts of an open world, all quest and inventory functionality, movement and third person mechanics, combat mechanics, stealth mechanics, and a day adn night cycle. I've been working on this current draft since January, and honestly I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along.

I figured I'd post how things are going here and make an actual dev log! ^.^