Back at It: Adventures in Actually Making a Game

Well, it’s been a minute (or roughly 1,460 days, but who’s counting?).

When I last posted in 2020, I’d just had my grand revelation about starting small. I was full of optimism, armed with Unity Pro, and ready to make a modest RTS game inspired by Frostpunk and Banished. Then, you know, life happened. Projects got shelved, priorities shifted, and that game design document found itself buried under other files on my hard drive.

But here’s the thing about game development dreams – they don’t really go away. They just hibernate.

So What Changed?

Fast forward to now, and I’m back at it. Only this time, I’ve made some interesting choices that 2020-me would find amusing. Remember how I said Unity just pulled ahead because of my experience with it? Yeah, well, I’m working in Unreal Engine 5 now.

Before you judge me for flip-flopping, let me explain: I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to throw away all that Unity knowledge. I spent time with both engines, weighed my options, and decided that for this particular project, Unreal made more sense. Also, I may have accumulated some Marketplace assets that would be a shame to waste.

What Am I Making?

Here’s where I’ll be deliberately vague (because mystery is fun, right?). I’m working on a city builder/strategy game with some interesting twists. Think isometric perspective, resource management, and some pressure mechanics that keep you on your toes. There might be some hostile elements involved. There might be research trees. I’m saying nothing more.

What I can tell you is that I’m actually building the thing this time. Not just writing design documents. Not just watching tutorials. Actually implementing systems, writing C++ code, and watching things work (and break, and work again after much cursing).

What’s Different This Time?

I took my own advice from 2020 – I started small. Well, smaller. My initial design document is still ambitious enough to keep me busy for 6-12 months, but it’s not the unmanageable monster I tried to tackle before. I’ve broken everything down into phases, and I’m focusing on getting core systems working before I even think about the fancy stuff.

I’ve also learned to embrace the chaos of game development. Unreal crashes? Sure, why not? Blueprint corruption from Live Coding? Been there. Materials not working the way you expect? Add it to the list. But here’s what I’ve discovered: you push through these problems, and suddenly you have a working building placement system with colour-coded preview feedback, and it feels amazing.

The Journey Continues

I’m not making any bold predictions about release dates or commercial success. Right now, I’m just enjoying the process of bringing ideas to life, one system at a time. Some days I make huge progress. Other days, I spend three hours figuring out why a material parameter won’t update. That’s game development.

I’ll try to post updates as things progress – nothing too spoiler-y, just glimpses into the development journey. If nothing else, it’s a good way to look back and see how far things have come.

And hey, if 2020-me could see current-me actually shipping functional game systems in Unreal Engine, he’d probably be pretty impressed. Then he’d ask why I didn’t just stick with Unity.

Fair question, past-me. Fair question.