Compared to Neverwinter Night’s Aurora, designing a map under UE4 is incredibly hard. Dominique and I have been planning the city, sketching the layout on paper, sculpting the landscape to place the river, the central hill, the palace, the cathedral, the industrial district, the various neighborhoods, Emer’s tower, the cemetery, the bridge, the walls, the marketplaces and much more, but there is a long way from envisioning a city and actually laying down all the elements in a pretty, realistic and playable way. A very long way!
Fortunately, UE4 is a blast, it’s unbelievably complex and, at the same time, powerful.
Everything is coming along nicely and in a few days, or weeks, I have no clue at this point, it could be months, we’ll have a stunning photo-realistic medieval city as a starting point for our adventures. I already own many UE4 packages but still have to design lots of objects, including all the cathedral elements, I got nothing at the moment and will have to start from scratch. That will be cool though, it’s only a lot of work.
Development will go faster and faster.
I spent hundreds of hours learning the ropes of UE4, now it’s time to put all of that to good use. The beginnings are tedious but the more I’ll be using the tool, the more confident I will grow and the faster I’ll design the game.
I now have a pretty decent knowledge about pretty much every technical aspect of development except characters.
My knowledge encompasses dozens of expertise areas from simple mesh design up to programming pretty much any functionality I want, but characters and armor are still a big question mark. I know how to sculpt a creature, but fear it will be ugly, I can texture it, and again fear it will look like a sack of shit, I can rig it, and fear the rig will not work properly, I can animate it, but fear the animations will suck and, most importantly, I dread the moment I will have to string all the pieces together.
Anyway, that’s not for this year for sure, so my goal is to get the most beautiful city I can dream of and go on from there.