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I’m Making a Video Game Part Three – The Software

Heyo. Zed here. Here’s my third post about the process of making my upcoming video games Astral: Allegro and Astral: Alliance. This post starts to get into the technical aspects of how the games will be coded. Both games are going to be made completely within the Unreal Engine 5. Unreal Engine 5 is free video game and rendering software that I rely on constantly in order to do this project. Everything I need to code the games is there so long as I learn the rules of how to work with it as a software and that I follow the documentation correctly when it comes to actually doing the code.

The Unreal Engine 5 contains two options for coding languages, C++ and Blueprints. I do not know anything about C++, but Blueprints make sense to me so I picked that as the coding language for the game. It’s simply a toggle in the Make a Project menu to switch between them but it can only be done at the start of a project. At least that’s how I do it. It’s next to the box where you enter the project’s name. Both languages can do anything the other can but all of the Unreal Engine 5 documentation and tutorials are in Blueprints. I’ve followed a bunch of them for practice and I’m good at knowing how to use the language to do what I need it to do.

Blueprints work. Good. But there’s a catch here. I can’t 3D model. I have no idea how to make an asset for anything. Assets are the physical objects and items that the game is made out of, like a player character, a tree, a chair, a table, or a wall. I can’t 3D model so I can’t make my own. I found a solution to this though. The software comes with a built in store to buy these off other people who use the software to make them. Thank goodness the software has that feature. I have what I need.

The best part is, most of the best assets are free. The Free Content Marketplace is part of the online store and stores thousands and thousands of free assets that contain everything I need to make the game. Quite frankly they’re better than the ones that cost money. So I’ve set myself a challenge, make the game and the entire game line with only Free Content Marketplace assets. So far it’s working great. That’s it for now. More later.

Zed

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