#19: Big Wheels Keep on Turnin’
“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”
Project update
In the last week I sent out 11 work proposals for my game! There are some still in the works, which is wild to me because I didn’t originally expect that I would need such a team, but I really do, and that’s the most important thing for a project - having the right people. I still have 3 or 4 to do, and they won’t all be possible to do this week, or perhaps even this month, but I’m pushing to bring forward absolutely everything that I can. 5 years as an auditor (where everything we do is project work) has taught me the value of always bringing forward any work that you can do in advance, because it’s going to be busy later. Always save yourself the headache if you can.
We’re now two weeks out from UnrealFest, where I’m hoping that my nerves will hold and I will spruik my game to other developers at the conference and nervously hand out my freshly printed business cards that feature not only me and this website, but a new, 2nd website specifically for the game! My cards even have QR codes so you can scan them and go to the websites that way! Nifty. Yes, yes, yes, I will share the new site soon, including the game’s name, its own colour palette and flavour, and a short cinematic reveal. That’s right… I’m working on a micro cutscene for a landing page! This is a new skillset to me, though it’s quite close to programming because Unreal Engine is freaking great and I can easily make a cutscene in the same application that I am using to make games.
Personal reflections - Birthdays
It was my birthday this week, yay! I used to be very ‘bah humbug’ about birthdays, because I felt a very powerful and overbearing need to be many different manly things, all of which stifled joy, but also somehow had their own little mirth. It was funny to me, to be a bit of a grinch and a wet blanket, because I’m quite sure that the people around me knew that it was for show. Yet, not all of it - public celebrations of which I was the centre did used to give me fear and anxiety, which I suspect is common in every population, but especially true in the closeted trans community. I’m only coming to find the words now that I’m a number of years down this transitory path on which I still tread, I’m trying. When you always have this feeling, somewhere on your body, like the zipper is stuck while you’re wearing a skinsuit that doesn’t fit, having every eyeball in the room on you is unnerving in a way that is difficult to describe but which I am quite sure you may have felt on your body somewhere just now, reading that. I’m not sure you could put words on it, either, so don’t be too upset with me for being cliché. Photographs used to do this to me, too. Again, transgender people don’t have a monopoly on these discomforts, but you could say we are something like its natural tycoons.
Anyway, what? Getting older. My birthday! I enjoy my birthdays now, and I don’t mind having my existence acknowledged, either. That is to say I’ve really enjoyed the love, care, friendship, compassion and guidance of everyone around me lately, and it’s topped up my spirits and sense of kinship, humanity and kindness. Thanks everyone!
Extracurricular game dev update
In case you missed it, last week I shared my first video of an Unreal Engine project, which I’ve embedded below again in case you’d like to take a look! There’ll be another one perhaps next week, or maybe the week after, of my 2nd project, which is a roleplaying game dialogue system. If you don’t know what that means, imagine that I’m creating the logic behind a ‘choose your own adventure’ book, except it’s a videogame.
I’m working on creating a little cutscene using Unreal Engine! This is super cool and fun, and while it’s different from ‘programming’ (it absolutely still is programming, but it just isn’t game programming, it’s film programming), there is a lot of crossover.
I haven’t looked at my online course (the one principally about marketing and pre-development of indie games) in weeks and weeks, and I really should get back to it. I think will get an opportunity soon, because for the first time since starting my programming course last February, I’m… ahead? I think I’m ahead. I don’t quite believe it, but here we are, which makes me feel like I can take my foot off it for a little bit (just a little) to direct my time and energy elsewhere. Here, I mean.
Textbook learnings
I haven’t been reading my textbooks for a couple of weeks because I ran a mile with Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine 5 by Marcos Romero and Brenden Sewell. At some point soon I will move on to Unreal Engine 5 RPG Development by Dr Chihming Chiu, which focuses entirely on C++ programming for Unreal. For those not in the know, C++ is the programming language that underlies Unreal, and the main reason Unreal is so easy to use is because their visual scripting system hides most of it. I like C++, but it is complicated. However, I feel like I’m really thrashing it with the visual scripting, so I feel confident now to step it up by taking off the training wheels and heading off the beaten path.
