I done did it

I've done. Finally. Well I started a month ago, but I'm finally taking the time to learn how to make games. I will probably suck at it, you probably shouldn't use this as a reference on how to make games because honestly? I have no idea what I'm doing. But I like documenting things, especially because my memory is so terrible. So yeah starting... now, I'm going to start documenting my learning process.

Step 1, Research Game Engines.
I'm going to be realistic here, who the hell has the time to make an entire engine on their own these days and one that's presentable? I do not, so I started looking at ready to go engines I could use. For the type of games I have in mind (RPGs, kids games, maybe 2d games) I needed a versatile engine. So I did what most people do, I started with unity. I immediately did not like it. For one, the pricing system is totally bonkers. If you use their free version, you can only make games that will make less than 100k USD. While I'll probably never get to that point, it's kind of lame to lock yourself into a system like that. So, I looked else where.

What are the other options? Not to start an engine war, but you're basically left with CryEngine or Unreal Engine. After reading various reviews and looking at their websites, I basically fell in love with Unreal Engine. The tooling looks amazing, the pricing is spectacular (20$ a month for FULL ACCESS TO THE ENGINE SOURCE). If you publish a game that makes > 5K USD you pay them only 5%, that's nothing.

So I have my engine, and well I've had it for about a month now. It is probably the most amazing tool I've ever used in my life. But I guess that's not saying much because my industry (infosec) is basically full of really crappy tools written by people who are not actually programmers.

Step 2, Learn The Engine
I've spent pretty much the last month watching the unreal's excellent video tutorials on how to use their blueprint system, how integration with C++ works and so forth. The ones by Zak Parrish are not only professional & well done, they are actually entertaining. A very hard thing to find in online video tutorials.

Step 3, Learn the Process
I have the benefit of knowing someone who has spent a large percentage of his life in the game industry so I have been relentlessly annoying him with dumb questions on how games are published, how tooling works and various other little details. Things I never knew about; like how critical tooling is (creating tools to aid in designers to build the game out), how models get created and imported into the engine, how textures are applied to the models and a whole slew of other really interesting processes regarding the workflow are slowly coming together. I'll probably plan a specific post on this or find a better link that describes it.

Step 4, Play & Learn
This is basically where I am at now. Reading documentation, playing with creating models for simple dumb games, looking over the example content that is provided by UE4. I'll document each of these as well in separate posts later.

I think that's it for now, stay tuned.